Six US Presidents Have Destroyed Iraq

[twomp]

It doesn’t take a PhD in Sociology to conclude that Iraq was better off with Saddam Hussein than it is today.

It’s not that Saddam was a great leader without blood on his hands. It’s just that what six US presidents have done to Iraq over the past 35 years has been much worse than anything Saddam ever did to the people of Iraq.



Under Saddam, Iraqis had a thriving economy that included a wealthy middle class, a high functioning infrastructure on par with the most developed nations of the world, and free healthcare and free education through graduate school. Today, Iraqis have an effective unemployment rate of 50%, a difficult time getting water and electricity, and bombed out hospitals and schools.

In Saddam’s Iraq, women’s rights were guaranteed in the constitution, religion played virtually no role in government, Sunni and Shia got along relatively well, and al-Qaeda didn’t exist. Today, Iraqis are facing Sharia law, Sunni and Shia are killing each other, and al-Qaeda in Iraq (now known as ISIS) has become arguably the most powerful non-government force in the world.

Good job, America

The reason Iraq is in the mess it is today is not because of some long-standing feud between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, it’s because six US presidents, spanning ten terms, have created a situation that made today’s Iraq inevitable.

The people of Iraq should be applauded for going this long without imploding. They obviously are more peaceful and have more fortitude than Americans. The United States would be in a state of anarchy if bombs were dropped on its major cities, crushing sanctions were levied that killed hundreds of thousands of its children, they were occupied by a foreign military, a puppet government was installed by another country, and arms were given to Republicans to shoot Democrats, and vice-versa.

But Americans can’t imagine that type of scenario, and they choose not to think about what their tax dollars, their elected officials, and their willful ignorance has done to another civilization.

And to add insult to injury, Americans, particularly Democrats, are essentially quiet now that their president is about to do the same thing to Iraq that five other presidents have already done.

So working chronologically backwards, here’s how six US presidents have destroyed Iraq.

Barack Obama

The US is at war in Iraq. Nobody wants to acknowledge it, possibly because this is not a war with Iraq, it’s a war inside Iraq.

Maybe people actually believed Obama two weeks ago when he said, "American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq." But on Tuesday it was announced that armed drones and Apache helicopters are being flown by US military inside Iraq.

Since when do "advisers" fly Apache helicopters and armed drones?

Also on Tuesday, The Hill reported that Obama is sending 200 more US troops to Iraq, bringing the total number of US ground forces in Iraq to 750. And on Wednesday, the State Department stated that the Obama administration wants to sell 4,000 more US Hellfire missiles to the Iraqi government.

At what point will "progressive" news outlets like Democracy Now and CommonDreams talk about "mission creep" and Obama doublespeak? It may be a while given they are currently talking about immigration, the NSA and the Hobby Lobby. Important issues, yes, but when your country is starting another war in a place it has already terrorized for 35 years, those issues need to be moved down the priority list.

If a Republican were in the Oval Office it’s a guarantee that the supposed left-leaning media and national antiwar groups would be going berserk, and might actually play a role in stopping the US from going back into Iraq.

But they won’t because their funding largely comes from Democrats, so they can’t go after Obama with the same vigor in which they did with Bush.

Even Kirsten Powers, who writes for the USA Today questioned the integrity of fellow liberals in Wednesday’s paper when she wrote, "Liberals who obsessed over President Bush’s abuses of executive power are suspiciously silent now, or worse, defend the same behavior they found abhorrent in a Republican."

George W. Bush

Not much needs to be said about what the younger Bush did to Iraq. Based on the lie (not bad intelligence, it was a lie) that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to the US, and on the ruse of tying Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush whipped Americans into a frenzy and got them to go along with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Bush’s war left at least one-half million Iraqis dead, forced nearly 4 million to become refugees, destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, and created an untold number of enemies of the US, including ISIS.

Bill Clinton

It was the Clinton administration that first perpetuated the myth that Saddam had WMD. "Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons," Clinton stated in 1998 in justifying missile strikes on Iraq.

And even after the Clinton presidency had expired, former Clinton VP Al Gore supported George W. Bush on the issue of Iraq WMD, saying, “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”

But the most extreme form of terrorism carried out by Clinton was with the use of sanctions on the civilians of Iraq that killed 500,000 children. "Medieval," and "unconscionable" were words used to describe the slow, painful deaths Iraqi children suffered due to the absence of food, basic medicines and anesthesia, which the US prohibited from being imported into Iraq.

Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright showed the true face of American compassion when she was asked about the deaths of a half million Iraqi children – more than the number who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – when she told 60 Minutes in 1996, "This is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it."

The humanitarian disaster resulting from sanctions against Iraq has been frequently cited as a factor that motivated the September 11 terrorist attacks. Osama bin Laden himself mentioned the Iraq sanctions as a reason for the attack against the United States.

Read the rest here:
http://original.antiwar.com/chris_er...estroyed-iraq/

[kcchiefs6465]

Good read. The United States was involved in Iraq a good fifteen years before Jimmy Carter though.

[heavenlyboy34]

The only nit I have to pick is this:

The US is at war in Iraq. Nobody wants to acknowledge it, possibly because this is not a war with Iraq, it’s a war inside Iraq.

I prefer not too call invasions/occupations "wars". That's an intentional distortion of language.

Otherwise a good piece.

[Henry Rogue]

The only nit I have to pick is this: I prefer not too call invasions/occupations "wars". That's an intentional distortion of language.

Otherwise a good piece.

No knock invasion?

[Henry Rogue]

The only nit I have to pick is this: I prefer not too call invasions/occupations "wars". That's an intentional distortion of language.

Otherwise a good piece.

No knock invasion?

[Constitutional Paulicy]

Our involvement goes back much further....

A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making
By Roger Morris
Published: March 14, 2003

On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of United States policy on Iraq agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980's.

Both sides are mistaken. Washington's policy traces an even longer, more shrouded and fateful history. Forty years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, under President John F. Kennedy, conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in collaboration with Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi leader seen as a grave threat in 1963 was Abdel Karim Kassem, a general who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. Washington's role in the coup went unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the C.I.A.

From 1958 to 1960, despite Kassem's harsh repression, the Eisenhower administration abided him as a counter to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt -- much as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980's against the common foe of Iran. By 1961, the Kassem regime had grown more assertive. Seeking new arms rivaling Israel's arsenal, threatening Western oil interests, resuming his country's old quarrel with Kuwait, talking openly of challenging the dominance of America in the Middle East -- all steps Saddam Hussein was to repeat in some form -- Kassem was regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.

In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies -- chiefly France and Germany -- resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s ''Health Alteration Committee,'' as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim.

Then, on Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but eventually Kassem gave up, and after a swift trial was shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television. Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. ''Almost certainly a gain for our side,'' Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to Kennedy the day of the takeover.

As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963 still a relatively small political faction influential in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.

According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite -- killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.

The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad -- for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.

But it wasn't long before there was infighting among Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, after yet another coup, the Baathist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized control, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers -- including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time -- speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.

This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it. Yet these interventions help explain why United States policy is viewed with some cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr. Bush and his advisers are following a familiar pattern.

The Kassem episode raises questions about the war at hand. In the last half century, regime change in Iraq has been accompanied by bloody reprisals. How fierce, then, may be the resistance of hundreds of officers, scientists and others identified with Saddam Hussein's long rule? Why should they believe America and its latest Iraqi clients will act more wisely, or less vengefully, now than in the past?

If a new war in Iraq seems fraught with danger and uncertainty, just wait for the peace.

source here.... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/op...he-making.html

[klamath]

Stopped reading after the first line.

It doesn’t take a PhD in Sociology to conclude that Iraq was better off with Saddam Hussein than it is today

Iraq was pretty much continuously at war under Saddam, including in his own country. Americans just pay more attention to the warfare in Iraq now after we got to know the country by invading and had it plastered all over the news for years. What is going on in Iraq is not new, just different dynamic players.

[Ronin Truth]

Six US Presidents Have Destroyed Iraq

That's just the kind of thing that happens when a country gets put on top of all of our oil.

[Occam's Banana]

Our involvement goes back much further....

[...] But it wasn't long before there was infighting among Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, after yet another coup, the Baathist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized control, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers -- including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time -- speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists. [...]

source here.... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/op...he-making.html

Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (another grandson of Theodore Roosevelt) was the CIA goon in charge of "Operation AJax" - which overthrew the Mossadeq regime in Iran and installed the Shah. And we all know how well THAT turned out ...

Is there any other family in America that has done more than the Roosevelts to screw this (and many other countries) over so badly?

[DFF]

The politicians trash their country, then they come here looking for (justified) revenge and attack us citizens....ain't blowback great?