POLICY ANALYSIS: Bush’s Dangerous Gamble :: North Texas Independent Media Center ::

Bush’s populist “scare tactic” alarmism has given many Americans the false impression that Iraq already has nuclear capability – or is very close to acquiring it. However, experts – including some cited by Bush himself – paint a much less frightening picture.

Prime Minister Tony Blair released an assessment by British intelligence on Sept. 24, that found that the U.N. embargo against Iraq has been successful in “hindering the import of crucial goods for the production of fissile material,” such as the enriched uranium needed for nuclear bombs.

The New York Times reported on Sept. 25, that British intelligence “judged that while sanctions remain effective, Iraq would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon.”

The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies reached a similar conclusion. In a report on Iraq’s nuclear capability released Sept. 9. “Iraq does not possess facilities to produce fissile material in sufficient mounts for nuclear weapons,” the IISS concluded. “It would require several years and extensive foreign assistance to build such fissile material production facilities.”

My argument with Peter Taylor has him lately responding that I am supporting the UN, an ineffective undemocratic institution, against a megalomaniac with nuclear weapons. I will say again Iraq has no nuclear weapons.

CLIFF PEARSON has separately sent me a very long e-mail Blood, Oil, and Sand: The Hidden History of America’s War on Iraq which details part of Saddam's history.

In 1958 Iraq’s leader, General Abdel Karim Qassem, refused to continue participating with the pro-Western, anti-Soviet, Baghdad Pact. In 1961, General Qassem further antagonized the West by nationalizing the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Corporation. (General Qassem had previously upset the British and the United States by simply coming to power in the first place. His assumption of leadership in Iraq ousted the Hashemite Monarchy that had been installed by the British Empire following World War I.)

The United States responded by having the CIA train an Iraqi opposition group, the Ba’ath Party, to stage a bloody coup to oust General Qassem. Iraq’s populist leader for five years, General Qassem was summarily tried in a studio in a Baghdad radio station, tied to a chair and shot dead.

Ali Saleh S’adi, a Ba’ath Party rebel who became the Minister of the Interior following the coup, told author Said Arburish in his book A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite that the CIA had trained the Ba’ath Party.

The CIA also played a primary role in creating the hit lists of those who were to be eliminated after the coup by the Ba’ath Party rebels. The hit lists were developed in CIA stations across the Middle East with the help of Iraqi exiles.

In Egypt, the CIA got most of its information on who to kill from Saddam Hussein, who had been living in exile in Cairo. Arburish reports that, “The American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time [magazine].”

As the CIA’s hit lists reached Baghdad, the result was a massacre of incredible cruelty. Arburish says 5,000 were killed in the coup – 600 of whom were doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed the educated elite of Iraq. Pregnant women and elderly people were butchered, some of them tortured to death in front of their children.

Saddam Hussein, who had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Egypt, personally tortured prisoners held in the coup’s detention centers. (Saddam Hussein was not unknown to the CIA. In 1959, when he was a 22-year-old Ba’ath Party member, he had been wounded in an attempt to assassinate General Qassem in Baghdad.)

The foreign base for the Ba’ath Party’s coup, according to Arburish, was in Kuwait. King Hussein of Jordan, who had close relations with the CIA himself, says that during the planning phase of the coup “many meetings were held between the Ba’ath Party and American intelligence – the most critical ones in Kuwait.” Arburish cites several sources in his book alleging that the coup was orchestrated via radio from a secret CIA base in Kuwait.

Arburish quotes Hani Fkaiki, one of the Ba’ath Party leaders, who reports that their American CIA trainer was William Lakeland, the U.S. Assistant Military Attaché in Baghdad.

On the morning of February 9, 1963, the day after the coup began, General Qassem surrendered to the Ba’ath Party rebels. He was executed shouting, “Long live the people!”

In 1972, OPEC, the international cartel of oil-producing nations, raised the price of crude oil from $3 per barrel to $22 per barrel in an effort to collectively profiteer off the West’s dependence on their product. Saddam Hussein, a vice president at the time in the new CIA coup-established government, reacted to this price-gouging opportunity by immediately encouraging the nationalization of Iraq’s oil fields. The United States reacted by branding Saddam Hussein “unreliable,” a “terrorist leader,” and throwing their primary Middle Eastern support to Iran, led by the pro-Western Shah.

....he goes on with more recent history and concludes...

In conclusion, it seems clear from the evidence that the goals of the United States and the West in Iraq are not to protect the innocent people from Saddam Hussein, but to: establish a dominant military presence in the Middle East, control Iraq’s oil production, and, apparently, utterly annihilate the Iraqi infrastructure and population.

I wondered aloud to my ex-wife Pat the other day what the activist military/intelligence agents did when Clinton was in power? In two years under Bush 2 they are promoting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and plotting a coup in Venezuela. Under Clinton the country was on the right track except for the continued attacks on Clinton and some of the policies he was forced to pursue facing a Republican Congress. What do agents trained to install authoritarian governments and promote American commercial interests do when Democrats are in power - assist the Republican party in bringing down Democrats? Am I getting too paranoid here?