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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SecularBull who wrote (354423)	2/5/2003 8:40:18 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

You don't remember? According to an MSNBC story from August, Rumsfeld was intimately involved in US support for Saddam -- US support that included assistance in planning battles and providing Saddam with US intelligence on Iran. This assistance was provided, according to MSNBC, even with knowledge that Iraq would use chemical weapons in it's battles with Iran. According to records recovered by MSNBC, Rumsfeld told Hussein that the use of chemical weapons "inhibited" relations between the US and Iraq. Even so, the US -- led in many ways by Rumsfeld himself -- gave Iraq lots of assistance in it's battles against Iran. After all that assistance, Kuwait happens (the bolded portion is critical): .................................. In 1980, shortly after formally assuming power, Iraq launched a devastating 8 year campaign against Iran? Why? There is really no satisfactory answer. The war resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands on both sides. It devastated both countries economically. Ultimately nothing was gained by either side. Iran could justify its response by the fact it was provoked. But the fact that Iraq was willing to expose its military to such a massive number of casualties for an unclear objective was the first illustration of Saddam's utter disregard for the value of human life. Most analysts suggest that Saddam Hussein resurrected a decades-old border dispute at a time that Iran was presumably weakened through a change in government. There was also historical ethnic antipathy between Persians and Arabs. At the very beginning of the war, Iraq gained some territory. But the war served as a unifying cause for the attacked Iranians who were well equipped with U.S. supplied military weaponry. When Iran recovered its occupied territory and began attacking Iraq, the international community and Arab states in particular began to support the Iraqi cause. The war ended when Iraq began to use chemical weapons to repulse Iranian advances. The U.S. behavior regarding this conflict is very puzzling. At the outset of the war, the U.S. did not have relations with either country. U.S. public opinion was highly hostile to the religious Iran regime because of the months-long hostage crisis in 1979. U.S., Russia and other nations helped supply Iraq with military assistance during this period. At the same time, the U.S. surreptitiously assisted Iran with weaponry which ultimately caused the "Iran-Contra" scandal and more Congressional oversight regarding covert operations. Despite its massive losses, Iraq gained some respect in the Arab world for having the resources and determination to conduct the war. Although the prosecution of this war cost Saddam Hussein some domestic popularity, his control of the country was so great that opposition could be easily and ruthlessly suppressed. What precipitated Iraq's subsequent annexation of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War? The Iran-Iraq war had been largely financed by the oil-rich gulf states, especially Kuwait. Now that the war was over, Kuwait was demanding its loans be paid back. Saddam accused Kuwait of deliberately flooding the market with oil so that the value of Iraq's oil declined. Apparently the United States told Iraq that it was not officially interested in the issue. Saddam Hussein seems to have taken that to mean he had a free hand in dealing with his grievances, and on August 2, 1990, he invaded Kuwait, easily overrunning the little country. He seriously failed to predict the international reaction. What followed was the 1991 Gulf War sanctioned by the United Nations in 1991 which ultimately decimated the Iraqi military, leaving Saddam Hussein vulnerable to dissidents in Iraq. For reasons which are not entirely clear, the U.S. did not engage in either a covert or overt effort to support either the Kurdish rebels in the North nor the opposition in southern Iraq during the aftermath of the war. The remnants of Hussein's army were able to quell these uprisings and thus Saddam Hussein remained in control.