Posted on 03/17/2003 4:32:13 PM PST by kattracks
The antiwar left and their friends in the press have repeatedly charged that the Reagan administration gave Iraq chemical weapons in the 1980s that Saddam Hussein used to gas the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war - a charge, it's worth noting, that Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger staunchly denies.
But there is another U.S. president whose fingerprints are evidently all over Saddam's rise to power. It's just that the media, not to mention one particular antiwar Senator, have developed a convenient case of amnesia about the episode.
In February 1963, the Central Intelligence Agency under President John F. Kennedy reportedly played a key role in the assassination of Iraqi prime minister Abdel-Karim Qasim.
In the aftermath of Qasim's death one-up-and coming Baath opposition party member, Saddam Hussein, made his name as "a brutal interrogator of communists, at least some of whom appeared on lists shared by the CIA," according to Hussein biographer Said Aburish.
In a synopsis of Aburish's book, the Discovery Channel Web site reveals that Saddam was one of several Baath Party members who often visited the American Embassy in Cairo four decades ago. "In fact, the Americans and the Baath Party exiles had something in common. Both would be happier if Qasim, with his pro-Communist leanings, was deposed as leader of Iraq."
In his book "Blood for Oil," Alfred Mendes offers more details on the Kennedy administration's role in Saddam's rise to power.
"In February 1963 Qasim was overthrown - and assassinated - by a Ba’athist Party coup, with the direct connivance of the CIA. This resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba’athist Saddam Hussein who had fled the country (to Egypt) after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim.
"Saddam was immediately assigned to the job of Head of the Al-Jihaz al-Khas (more popularly known as Jihaz Haneen), the clandestine Ba’athist Intelligence organisation - and, as such, he was soon after involved in the killing of some five thousand communists."
Says author Mendez, "Saddam’s rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!"
Could it be that one of the reasons Sen. Ted Kennedy has become such a prominent spokesman for the antiwar Democrats is because he fears that post-liberation revelations from the Baath Party's archives might further tarnish his brother's legacy?
Of course, JFK had no way of knowing that forty years later his CIA-backed coup would lead to one of the most serious U.S. national security threats since his Cuban missile crisis. Just as Reagan played no role in decisions by private companies to contravene U.S. law and sell poison gas to the Iraq.
But it's worth noting that while the conservative president is regularly tarred by loose allegations suggesting that he was a Saddam enabler, the Kennedy-Hussein connection has gone virtually unreported since President Bush declared Iraq a member of the Axis of Evil.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
See? Everyone has their good points....
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