Did Rumsfield and Cheney have to go back to Iraq and get Saddam on

[applegrove]

genocide/weapons-of-mass-destruction because the US supported Saddam's use of gas on Iran? Anyone know if Rumsfield and Cheney were working for the White House at that time during the Iran/Iraq war?

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Rummy was SecDef

[Scootaloo]

2. Actually he wasn't

At least, not during the Iran-Iraq war. He was SecDef during the Ford administration, then Dubya.
Cheney was SecDef for H. W. Bush

The Iran-Iraq war was entirely during the Reagan administration, 1980 to 1988; Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci were Secretaries of defense in that period

[applegrove]

3. So what was Rumsfield's job when he met with Saddam Hussein and shook his

hand? Do you know what I mean? That was during the Iran/Iraq war. When Saddam was an ally.

[Scootaloo]

4. he was appointed Special envoy to the Middle East by Reagan

but was at the time considered a private citizen.

Vultures tend to circle, I've noticed.

[applegrove]

5. Those neocons were drumbeating for war with Iraq years before 9/11. I have

the right to speculate on their reasons why. Why? Because I like history. And that is how history is done. If Rumsfield doesn't want to be in history he should not have headed straight for the most powerful jobs in the world he was qualified for. Not once, but three times.

[Scootaloo]

6. I wasn't bagging on you

The vultures comment was about how these same buzzards keep showing up to dip their head in the carcass again and again.

The drumbeats for war against Iraq had two reasons - He attacked our client states, Saudi Arabia and Israel. We were happy hwen he was gassing Iranians, we gave him the intelligence on their positions so that he could, and we were happy to send him the chemicals he needed. We were happy to sit by and let him eat Kuwait, too... it wasn't until his tanks rolled into northeastern Saudi Arabia that we suddenly got interested in what the Mustachioed Menace was up to. And then he hit Israel with Scuds, and that was just unforgivable.

The PNAC plan is essentially a scheme to advance and protect Israeli and Saudi - and by proxy US - interests in the middle east. The thing is, it dovetails very nicely with the preexisting US agenda which is to subordinate the middle east to US power - or else.

[TexasProgresive]

7. Your memory and therefore your words are right on.n/t

[Scootaloo]

8. It more a case of "study" than "memory"

I was nine in 1991, and unless you count some vague memories of Tom Brokaw talking about the Sandinista, the Gulf War was my "first." I remember watching the news over dinner, and being nearly scared to death by the talk of how amazingly powerful Saddam was. How he had the biggest military in the world, how he had these terrible weapons, the gas bombs and the germ bombs and even back then talk of nuclear weapons. I was young, but old enough to have absorbed those last stages of Cold War terror about those sort of things. So imagine a nine year old boy choking down his mac and cheese, watching the news coverage of this, even with as scrubbed and Hollywood-friendly as the defense department mandated it be, and being absolutely certain that if it was on the news, it must be true, and this motherfucker was going to destroy the world five times over and that we had to "take him out," and we had to do it fast, else it'd be the end of the world.

[joshcryer]

9. That happened before the US signed on to the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The US was still producing chemical weapons.

edit: I got it wrong initially, dates were off.