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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1036580)	11/2/2017 10:01:41 PM
From: Broken_Clock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573849

Stalin kept the regime in power that in future years kept Saddam in power. George Bush is Stalin? "The intelligence given to Saddam was not always "thin gruel," as [one former US official] puts it. At times, it was of considerable strategic use and came from the highest American sources--namely then Vice-President George H. W. Bush. "As I reported in the New Yorker in 1992 (co-authored with Murray Waas) and in my book, House of Bush, House of Saud (pp73-75), in 1985 the Reagan Bush administration was trying to execute its arms for hostages deals with Iran when they ran into a problem: Iran didn't need any more weapons. "At the time, Bill Casey reasoned that if Saddam escalated his air war, Iran would need the weapons and would finally be forced to make a deal. But there was another problem: Iraq was afraid to lose planes and didn't know where they should be bombing. "So Casey turned to Bush and in the summer of 1986 the Vice-President made what was widely reported as a peace mission to the Middle East. Secretly, however, on July 30, 1986 Bush initiated the transfer of military intelligence to Saddam when he went to Jordan and told King Hussein to relay a message to Saddam that Iraq had to be more aggressive in bombing inside Iran. On August 4, Bush met with Mubarak in Cairo and repeated the message. In the past, Saddam had rejected US advice to escalate bombing, but now, in desperate need of US money and weapons, he began to comply. Meanwhile, the CIA fed highly classified tactical intelligence to Iraq. The US also supplied Saddam with technical equipment so Iraq could receive satellite intelligence assessing the impact of its air strikes. "During the 48 hours after Bush's visit with Mubarak, Iraq flew 359 missions over Iran. Over the next few weeks, Iraqi planes continued to strike deep into Iran, bombing oil refineries, including the oil facilities on Sirri Island, 460 miles from the border, a daring feat for Iraqi pilots who were running out of fuel. "In addition, to intelligence, there was money and [the] contention, [according to a former US official], that "the US aspect of Iraq's war effort...must be somewhere in the neighborhood of .0001% of the total" vastly understates the US role in helping Iraq. All told, the Reagan and Bush administrations provided Saddam with more than $5 billion in loan guarantees. "Even after the August 1988 cease fire between Iran and Iraq, even after the State Department told James Baker that Iraq was working on chemical and biological weapons, and even after discovering that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program, President Bush pressed for a billion dollars in agricultural loan guarantees, and waived congressional restrictions on Iraq's use of the Export-Import Bank." Craig Unger is the author of House of Bush, House of Saud (Scribn