Mar 20, 20194 min read

How Bush senior and junior lied about Saddam to justify illegal wars against Iraq.

Like father like son. Both Bush senior in 1990 and Bush junior on 2003 used lies to justify their war against Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Saddam Hussein was a brutal, genocidal, dictator who commited many crimes, but he was also a former unofficial US ally, which supported and sanctioned his crimes and brutalities because it served US interests in the region. Saddam first rise to power happened in 1963, when a CIA coup in Iraq ousted the existing government of General Abdel Karim Kassem, and bought the Ba'ath party, Saddam being a prominent party member and later its leader, into power. In 1980, encouraged and supported by the US, Saddam Hussein started the Iran-Iraq war which lasted for almost eight years and claimed the lives of over a million dead Iranians and Iraqis. The Reagan Administration secretly decided to provide highly classified intelligence to Iraq in the spring of 1982 while also permitting the sale of American-made arms to Baghdad. US officials acknowledged that American arms, technology and intelligence helped Iraq to become, with much help from the Soviet Union later, into a regional power.

Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983. Saddams's most atrocious crime was the genocide of the Kurdish population of northern Iraq, between 1986 and 1989. Following a Kurdish insurgency which numbered a few thousands of fighters, Saddam sent 200,000 troops into northern Iraq. He destroyed approximately 4,500 Kurdish villages and displaced at least a million of the country's estimated 3.5 million Kurdish population. He also executed, gassed and starved up to 180,000 Kurds, most of whom were innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the insurgency. The U.S. knew full well that Hussein launched some of the worst chemical attacks in history - on his own people - and still did not stop shipments of US weapons to Iraq.

A monument in memory of the victims of a chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja. In 1990, The George Bush's Administration's message to Baghdad, articulated in public statements in Washington by senior policy makers and delivered directly to Mr. Hussein by the United States Ambassador, April C. Glaspie, was this: "The United States was concerned about Iraq's military buildup on its border with Kuwait, but did not intend to take sides in what it perceived as a no-win border dispute between Arab neighbors." The U.S. State Department had earlier told Saddam that Washington had "no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait." In a meeting with Mr. Hussein in Baghdad on July 25, eight days before the invasion, Ms. Glaspie urged the Iraqi leader to settle his differences with Kuwait peacefully but added, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.'"

April Glaspie meets Saddam Hussein in 1990.

One week after the meeting, Saddam’s troops would storm into Kuwait and occupy the country. It's hard to see how Saddam, after getting repeated messeges from the Bush administration about how the US about not taking sides in this conflict and how it had no commitments to Kuwait, could've interperted this in any way besides the US tacitly telling him that he had a free hand and could do whatever he wanted with Kuwait.

Several months later George Bush senior and his administration would use as justification Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, an invasion they unofficialy greenlighted and endorsed, as an excuse to declare war on Iraq and launch operation “desert storm” and start the first Gulf War.

In 2003 George Bush's son, president George W Bush would also emulate his dad and would launch an attack against Saddam and Iraq based on a pack of lies. He was even surrounded by the same neocons, people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton that helped his dad launch his war against Iraq. However unlike his dad who only attacked Iraq, Bush senior would go much further and invade and occupy it. The justification of the Bush administration for the invasion were that Saddam was helping and funding Al Qaeda and Bin Laden and that he had weapons of mass destruction. Both claims, that were pumped 24/7 by the US and world media brainwash both US and world audiences, and turned out to be complete lies which were based on nothing. Since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the sectarian violence that followed it until this very day it is estimated that at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives.