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| Ξ Poem | WMDs Notes |
Our thug: Saddam Hussein, whose CIA trainers considered him a low-class thug, was in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America for over 40 years, beginning in 1959 under President Dwight Eisenhower, when the CIA hired him as a member of a squad charged with asssassinating Abdul Karim Qassim, Iraq's immensely popular Prime Minister. Qassim had committed the unforgivable sins of nationalizing the British-American oil industry, threatening to reännex Kuwait, helping found the anti-Western Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), withdrawing from the 1955 anti-Soviet Middle East Treaty Organization, appointing anticorporatists to powerful political positions, and buying weaponry from Russia. Saddam's attempted coup failed, and he escaped to Lebanon and Egypt for further CIA training. But when a subsequent CIA-backed coup attempt in 1963 succeeded, Saddam immediately returned to help torture and murder thousands of anticorporatists named by the CIA. Soon after, he reopened the oil industry to British and American corporations and renounced claims to Kuwait. Once he had consolidated his power, however, Saddam repeated many of Qassim's sins, renationalizing the oil industry in 1972 and socializing the economy with compulsory free education, universal free world-class health care, nationwide infrastructure development, and land redistribution to peasants. Nevertheless the CIA kept him on the payroll, as a counterweight to Iran and Syria, and in 1979 he offered to attack Iran for the U.S., which he proceeded to do in 1980. But when Saddam went further and suggested reännexing Kuwait, the U.S., under President George H. W. Bush, entrapped him by privately approving the move but then publicly using Iraq's attack on Kuwait as an excuse to invade Iraq, obliterate the country's infrastructure, and laid total siege to the country in an effort to finally drive Saddam into submission and get him to open the oil industry to U.S. corporations. The unsuccessful siege, a genocide by the United Nations definition, lasted 13 years and caused over 2 million civilian Iraqi deaths from bombing, disease, starvation, and radiation poisoning from U.S. depleted-uranium ammunition. Yet the CIA continued to keep Saddam in power as a counterweight to Iran and Syria, until ‘President’ George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush, under the pretext of ridding Iraq of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ imminently threatening the U.S., invaded Iraq again in 2003, deposed Saddam, and installed a new government charged with privatizing the oil industry and all government services into the hands of corporations based in America, Britain, and other collaborators.
our funds: The U.S. provided funding for Saddam's Ba‘th Party from 1959 on, and under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Iraq became the third-highest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, to the tune of over $1 billion per year, most of it earmarked for the purchase of military supplies and equipment, including for chemical, biological, and nuclear ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In a sense, though, those weren't really ‘our’ funds: As with U.S. neocolonialism throughout the world, the funds so generously provided to Iraq were a pittance compared to the funds extracted from Iraq in the form of crude oil and other natural resources.
our bombs: The Reagan and Bush I regimes were officially neutral toward Saddam Hussein's build-up of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and tried to keep their hands clean by officially permitting U.S. sales to Iraq only of ‘dual-use’ technology and materials ostensibly destined only for civilian purposes, and by arranging for foreign front corporations to provide all exclusively military materiel whenever possible. But for certain critical materiel they were unable to find outside suppliers, and so, for example, U.S. biological-warfare labs shipped biological-weapons materials to Iraq biological-warfare labs, including Bacillus anthracis, Clostridium botulinum, Histoplasma capsulatum, and Escherichia coli. Only once did the U.S. ever check up on the purported civilian use of dual-use materiel, and then only with ample advance warning and by inspectors who understood no Arabic. And although the CIA kept the U.S. President informed of the trade recipients' development of missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weaponry, the U.S. continued to sell and organize the sale of additional dual-use materiel to Iraq. The dual-use chemicals sold by U.S. corporations to Iraq, including cyanide and precursors for mustard gas and nerve gas, were used by Saddam to poison hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqi Kurds.
our beck destroyed: United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, introduced by the United States and passed in 1991, required Iraq to destroy all chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as all missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers. Saddam Hussein provided 12 thousand pages of documentation proving that he had destroyed all illegal missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and led international inspectors to the sites where the remains were buried.
Why can't we find them?: To justify attacking Iraq, the Bush II regime claimed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had amassed huge supply of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, including chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as long-range ballistic missiles, and warned that an Iraqi strike on U.S. territory was imminent. To circumvent the awkward fact that an army of United Nations weapons inspectors scouring Iraq for a decade had failed to find any evidence of renewed weapons-building activity since Saddam's exhaustive documentation of the destruction of all such weaponry 10 years earlier, George W. Bush expelled the inspectors, claimed that Saddam had expelled them, and invaded Iraq anyway. Ten days into the invasion, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared of the WMDs with famous precision: “We know where they are: They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.” But the farce was not kept up for long, and a year later, ‘President’ Bush made light of the pretence by pretending to look for the missing WMDs under his desk and behind his curtain. Less than two years, the search was officially called off.