Did the US help put Saddam in power?

I was just on the phone for over an hour with a Repub (friend of Hubbys). It was very unpleasant. I kept listening to him tell me that I was crazy if I didn't believe that Iraq was a threat.... it was really unpleasant.

I said that we (US) helped Saddam to power. I was right,..right? I could research it myself, But I was hoping someone would have the info handy. I told him I would e-mail him some links.

Thanks,
Gina

PS - He told me I hated America and should move!

we certainly helped increase his military arsenol and his percieved power throughoutt he world. Reagan and 41 had no problem with him gasing and using wmd's on Iranians.

even he admits it is true.

He was a Soviet Client - and he shot his way to the top with out US aid...he was a socialist by our terms today and yesterday...

He was at War with Iran though, and we helped him there.

we considered him an allie and helped him during the Iraq/Iran War. Read this:

-snip -

In March 1981, the Iraqi Communist Party, repressed by Saddam Hussein, beamed broadcasts from the Soviet Union calling for an end to the war and the withdrawal of Iraqi troops.<31> That same month U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he saw the possibility of improved ties with Baghdad and approvingly noted that Iraq was concerned by "the behavior of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern area." The U.S. then approved the sale to Iraq of five Boeing jetliners, and sent a deputy assistant secretary of state to Baghdad for talks.<32> The U.S. removed Iraq from its notoriously selective list of nations supporting international terrorism<33> (despite the fact that terrorist Abu Nidal was based in the country)<34> and Washington extended a $400 million credit guarantee for U.S. exports to Iraq.<35> In November 1984, the U.S. and Iraq restored diplomatic relations, which had been ruptured in 1967.<36>

http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/ShalomIranIraq.html

over this. We helped him in the Iran- Iraq war, certainly. But I believe he brought himself to power by killing off his enemies. Now I was having a major argument with some people on DU who were saying the US put him in power which I deny. I don't believe that theory as he came into power when we were in the Cold War and the US was simply not worrying about Iraq at the time he came into power.

So you hate America, huh? (teehee)
Did the guy say how he knew Iraq was a threat?

the freeper wanna be told me Hussein was in control of Iraq in the mid 60's.

Great link!
Thanks

kept him there, and supplied him with weapons.

I said it because I believed it to be true, but whan it came time to send him a link I had none.

Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power.


Another very good example of a CIA-organized regime change was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.

In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go!

In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/217.html

Gina

:hi:

the following is an excerpt from the book "Sorrows of the Empire" by Chalmers Johnson pg 223

snip:In July 1979, Iraq also acquired a new leader, Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti of the Ba'ath Party. Slightly more than 20 years earlier, in 1958, Iraqi military officers inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist revolt in 1952 against the British backed monarchy in Egypt, had seized power and taken the country in a Soviet leaning direction. The leader of the coup, General Abdel-Karim Kassem, proclaimed a republic, withdrew from the anti Soviet Baghdad Pact, legalized the Communist Party, decreed wide ranging land reform, and even granted autonomy to the Kurds in the north. These shifts, coming at the height of the Cold War, were too much for the US-CIA director Allan Dulles publicly called Iraq "the most dangerous spot in the world"- and in 1963, the CIA supported the anti communist Ba'ath Party's efforts to bring Kassem's republic to an end. Ba'ath activists, including a youthful Saddam Hussein, gunned down Kassem and many others on a list the CIA supplied. The plotters were able, however, only to create a coalition government. In 1968, the CIA again fomented a palace revolt in which the Ba'athists eliminated their coalition partners and assumed direct control. According to Roger Morris, a staff member of the national Security Council during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, "It was a regime that was really primary". In July 1979, the same year as the anti American revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein replaced his mentor, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, as president, a position he held until 2003. He was like many other famous beneficiaries of American political intrigue before and since, a CIA "asset".