United States partially responsible for Iraq’s troubles

While former Enron CEO and major Republican donor Ken Lay is busy cackling to himself about… While former Enron CEO and major Republican donor Ken Lay is busy cackling to himself about the millions of dollars he stole, another major criminal with White House contacts may be going to court.

With his recent acquisition of legal counsel, Saddam Hussein may soon be tried and found guilty for being the murderous thug that he is.

Of course, it takes two to tango, and just as Ashanti cannot be excused for singing the hook on Ja Rule’s “Always on Time,” nor should the other party in Saddam’s escapades be overlooked come trial time.

That other party is the United States, which bears direct responsibility for what are often cited as Saddam’s worst crimes — the uses of chemical weapons against Iran and the Iraqi Kurdish population during the 1980s.

The United States, notes the Christian Science Monitor, “helped create Iraq’s deadly arsenal at the time by supplying lethal ingredients, sophisticated facilities, and a green light” to defeat Iran in whatever way possible. That “green light” led to a level of carnage surpassing even Osama’s wildest ejaculatory fantasies — “100,000 people were exposed to nerve agents like Sarin and Soman, and blistering agents like mustard gas,” including the 10 thousand who “died almost immediately” at the hands of the U.S.-backed Iraqi regime.

How touching, then, that The New York Times coolly noted on March 29, 1984 — George Orwell references aside — that “American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the United States,” just a few weeks after the State Department explicitly stated that “available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons.”

Those diplomats were led by Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld, whose current infatuation with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction contrasts quite tellingly with his active support of Iraq when they actually had and were using such weapons.

Not content with providing just chemical weapons, the United States decided that Iraq also deserved $200 million worth of helicopters. As must have shocked Rumsfeld and others who were busy supporting Saddam’s brutality, those are the same helicopters believed by U.S. intelligence sources to be “among those dropping the deadly bombs” and “poisonous gas” on Kurdish civilians in 1988, according to the Los Angeles Times.

If Americans are content to ignore these implications, Iraqis are not.

“Saddam should not be the only one who is put on trial,” said one Iraqi in a Reuters article. “The Americans backed him when he was killing Iraqis so they should be prosecuted.”

Yet, as is common in the annals of young, wild-eyed friendship, the two companions had an unfortunate falling out — a falling out that occurred when “Washington began branding Saddam a tyrant and an enemy after his troops invaded oil-rich Kuwait in 1990,” notes Reuters.

Strategic interests supercede radical principles like “democracy” and “human rights,” and so after President Bush the First encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War, rebelling Iraqi generals asked the United States for access to captured weapons. They were denied, and Saddam was allowed to use helicopter gunships to crush the rebellions of the Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south.

The reason, which was clear to the centrist liberal New York Times chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman, was that what the United States really wanted was to have “the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.”

But, with the alternative being a popular uprising, Saddam’s own iron-fisted Iraqi junta would suffice.

Given this track record of support, the use of Saddam’s transgressions to justify the war is, in the words of Arundhati Roy, like “deifying Jack the Ripper for disemboweling the Boston Strangler. And that after a quarter-century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling was a joint enterprise. It’s an in-house quarrel. They’re business partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack’s the CEO.”

And, as the recent Enron debacle demonstrates, CEO’s are never brought to justice.

Kevin gets more hate mail than 2Pac has posthumous albums. E-mail him at kbf1@pitt.edu.