Look In the Mirror USA . This Is Our Policy bearing fruit in the M.E.

[brindis_desala]

and it didn't start with Bush and Cheney.

A Tyrant Forty Years in the Making
By Roger Morris*
New York Times
March 14, 2003

<snip>

In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies
— chiefly France and Germany — resisted. But without significant opposition within the government, Kennedy, like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The C.I.A.'s "Health Alteration Committee," as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim.

<snip>

According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. No one knows the exact toll, but accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.

The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad — for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/2003/0314history.htm

[knowbody0]

1. just plain ugly

[ixion]

2. Yep, that's some mess we've made

with the help of the Brits, of course.