Re: Hussein was caged & contained, and he should have been taken out covertly.
John Perkins, the author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" describes why the war was the solution of choice. It is the third approach taken with foreign leaders by the U.S. elites. The first attempt is to corrupt the leader. In Saddam's case, he agreed to be corrupted for a time, but then became recalcitrant to U.S. desires. Then the "jackals" were sent in for covert ops, but Saddam proved to be too well protected by his Republican Guards. So the third approach was to use the military to enforce the will of the U.S. policymakers.
democracynow.org
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AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. Iraq. How does that fit into the stories you have told us during this hour?
JOHN PERKINS: Well, Iraq followed Saudi Arabia. After our tremendous success in Saudi Arabia, we decided we should do the same thing in Iraq. And we figured that Saddam Hussein was corruptible. And, of course, we had been involved with Saddam Hussein anyway for some time. And so the economic hit men went in and tried to bring Saddam Hussein around, tried to get him to agree to a deal like the royal House of Saud had agreed to. And he didn't. So, we sent in the jackals to try to overthrow him or to assassinate him. They couldn't. His Republican Guard was too loyal and he had all these doubles. We couldn't do it. So, when the economic hit men and the jackals both failed, then the last line of defense that the United States, the empire, uses these days, is the military. We send in our young men and women to die and to kill, and we did that in Iraq in 1990. We thought Saddam Hussein at that point was sufficiently chastised that now he would come around, so the economic hit men went back in in the 1990s, failed once again. The jackals went back in, failed once again, and so once again the military went in -- the story we all know -- because we couldn't bring him around any other way. <END COPY> |
