The secret truth about the Saddam Hussein - USA relationship

Saddam Hussein was a brutal, genocidal, dictator who committed 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. While not directly supplying Saddam with weapons to fight Iraq, the CIA secretly directed armaments and hi-tech components to Iraq through false fronts and friendly third parties such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait, and they quietly encouraged rogue arms dealers and other private military companies to do the same

Saddam meets Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq in 1983

Saddam executed tens of thousands of Iraqis during his years as absolute dictator but his most atrocious crime was the genocide of the Kurdish population of northern Iraq, between 1986 and 1989. He blamed the Kurds for siding with Iran during the war and for wanting to sever northern Iraq and declare an independent Kurdish state.

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, money, resources and intelligence to Iraq. Saddam also used indiscriminate gas attacks on Iranian soldiers. His favorite tactic was to gas Iranian troops whenever the situation on the battlefield was turning against him. It was American and western companies, mainly German, that provided Saddam with the chemicals he later used on Kurds and Iranians. The Reagan Administration fully supported Saddam's Iraq during the war years and even after an Iraqi warplane attacked a US warship and killed 37 sailors. 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. What Saddam didn't know was that the US was also secretly selling weapons to the Iranians, via Israel, which included sophisticated weaponry such as high tech anti aircraft missiles in what became the infamous "Iran-Contra Affair". The US would later engage Iran directly and bomb and destroy Iranian ships, oil rigs, military and civilian targets in a effort to tilt the war to Saddam's side and help him win (Operation "Praying Mantis"). The direct US intervention in the Iran Iraq war helped to pressure Iran to agree to a ceasefire with Iraq later that summer, ending the eight-year conflict between the Persian Gulf neighbors, and saving Saddam from a military defeat.

In 1990 Saddam was keen on invading Kuwait. But before launching any kind of military operation he wanted to clear things with the George Bush's Administration, by telling him about his plans and seeking its approval. 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." 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 messages 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 interpreted 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 unofficially 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.

When Saddam was caught in 2003, the US refused to try him in the International Criminal Court. The reason why the Saddam's trial was held under Iraqi auspices rather than in the International Criminal Court was, as Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, told the media in 2004: 'It's to protect their own dirty laundry... The U.S. wants to keep the trial focused on Saddam's crimes and not on their acquiescence.''