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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (3115)	1/22/2003 10:35:02 AM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

We deliberately let him have those weapons because we wanted the rebellion to be crushed. We wanted Saddam to be our puppet dictator, in the standard model of American 3rd-world client states. Tom

To: Brumar89 who wrote (3115)	1/22/2003 11:14:49 AM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

<<< During the Gulf War, President George Bush Senior called on 'the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their hands and force Saddam Hussein to step aside'. In March 1991, the majority Shi'a people in the south rallied to Bush's call and rose up. So successful were they, at first, that within two days Saddam Hussein's rule had collapsed across southern Iraq and the popular uprising had spread to the country's second city, Basra. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand. Then the tyrant's old paramour in Washington intervened just in time. 'The opposition,' Said Aburish told me, 'found themselves confronted with the United States helping Saddam Hussein against them. The Americans actually stopped rebels from reaching arms depots. They denied them shelter. They gave Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard safe passage through American lines in order to attack the rebels. They did everything except join the fight on his side.' In their book, Out of the Ashes: the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn describe the anguish of one of the rebel leaders, a brigadier, who watched American helicopters circling overhead as Iraqi government helicopter crews poured kerosene on columns of fleeing refugees and set them alight with tracer fire. 'I saw with my own eyes the American planes flying over the helicopters,' he said. 'We were expecting them to help; now we could see them witnessing our demise . . . They were taking pictures and they knew exactly what was happening.' Snipping a similar account of the Kurdish rebellion in the North... Why? What the Americans fear is that the Kurds might establish their own state, perhaps even socialist and democratic, and that the Shi'a might forge an 'Islamic alliance' with Iran. What they do not want is for them to 'take matters into their own hands'. The American television journalist Peter Jennings put it this way: 'The United States did not want Saddam Hussein to go, they just didn't want the Iraqi people to take over.' Brent Scocroft. President Bush Senior's National Security Adviser, concurred. In 1997, he said: 'We clearly would have preferred a coup. There's no question about that.' The New York Times columniist Thomas Friedman, a guard dog of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington wants is 'an iron-fisted Iraqi junta', which would be 'the best of all worlds.' The clear conclusion is that they want another Saddam Hussein, rather like the one they had before 1991, who did as he was told. >>> fishbowl.pastiche.org Tom