User talk:InforManiac/Saddam Hussein – United States relations

I understand that you felt the need to create this page, but you and any viewers should know why its content isn't totally identical to the Iraq-US relations page. The most notable omission is probably the claim made by a Middle Eastern politician, Said K. Aburish. His claims are mentioned in the article on US-Iran relations:

Said K. Aburish claimed that Saddam Hussein visited Amman, Jordan before the war, where he may have met with King Hussein and three CIA agents. Aburish believes that there is "considerable evidence that he discussed his plans to invade Iran with the CIA agents". The records of the meeting that occurred on this date between American officials and King Hussein suggest that Saddam Hussein was not present and that the border disputes between Baghdad and Tehran were not discussed, but that joint efforts between Jordan and the United States to oppose Iran were discussed.[37] Others have also opposed this view; Eric Alterman in The Nation has called the charge a “slander” and argued there is no credible evidence to back it up.[38] Adam Tomkins wrote: "There were no diplomatic relations between the US and Iraq for seventeen years, until president Reagan restored them in 1984".[39]

The only other sources for this claim are Iranian government propaganda and the blog of a delusional conman, Robert Parry, who claims to have broken into government buildings and found "an X-file" proving its veracity. It obviously falls under WP:FRINGE. Now, in addition, the claims here that the CIA was involved in the 1959 coup attempt are best dismissed as a complete fantasy and a conspiracy theory. No serious historian of Iraq--from Charles Tripp to Con Coughlin--believes this to be the case. The CIA's plots against Qasim were formally investigated by Congress in the seventies (see the Church committee), and declassified documents show that it began plotting against Qasim in February 1960. The plot involved a poisoned handkerchief. It was unrelated to the Ba'ath Party, it wasn't even intended to kill Qasim, and it may never have been implemented at all. The 1959 machine-gunning of Qasim by the Ba'ath was apparently backed by Egypt and Syria. When it failed, Saddam Hussein fled to Egypt, and he lived there until 1963. He played no role in the 1963 coup, and although he subsequently returned to Iraq; he was arrested in 1964 following Arif's decision to purge the Ba'ath from the government. There are some allegations that U.S. officials had contacts with Saddam or his associates while he lived in Egypt, as often happens when gathering intelligence--but these allegations, which the U.S. denies (as well as Coughlin's account of the 1959 plot) were all added to Wikipedia's Saddam Hussein biography. Finally, Roger Morris, a highly unreliable fringe source, argued that the U.S. "encouraged" the subsequent coups in some unspecified way--but his claims seem frankly impossible in light of the fact that he is the only source, and he got numerous basic facts wrong. For example, he claimed that Arif was a Ba'athist (when Arif actually purged the Ba'ath from the government and there were more Ba'athists serving under Qasim) and he attributed the claims to Archibald Roosevelt (who served in the Middle East from 1949-51; even if he meant Kermit Roosevelt, KR retired in 1958). Notably, Morris' only allegation was that U.S. officials met with Ba'athists in 1964 and made an agreement to offer them aid if they regained power--a Wikipedia editor used this claim to justify the notion that the CIA played a direct role in the subsequent power struggles. Nevertheless, the idea that the U.S. armed Iraq in the seventies, when arm sales to Iraq were formally illegal due to a law passed by Congress--or had "close relations" with al-Bakr (with whom it had no relations whatever)--is simply a lie. Many of these sources contradicted each other, some can be easily debunked by reference to government records, others were from blogs like Common Dreams, (which ultimately concluded that the CIA probably did not play a role in Iraq in the sixties--despite the fact that it was cited on this page in support of the opposite assertion--and it was incorrectly cited here as Reuters) and the credible ones (even Aburish's allegations) have been added to other relevant articles by many different editors. Most of the text was redundant, and many of the claims constituted original research. There used to be statements, on this former article, to the effect that the U.S. military was sent to Iraq in the sixties to kill communists—these can only be described as fantasies. And, by the way, I don't know where Morris got the idea that the U.S. or U.K. armed and abandoned the Kurds against Qasim, because to my knowledge Qasim was renowned as the one Iraqi leader with good relations with the Kurds. Perhaps he meant to refer to the joint U.S.-Iran arming of the Kurds against the Ba'athists in the Second Kurdish-Iraqi War (from 1972-75)? If so, then his sloppiness truly knows no limits. I did find a blog, written in all caps, claiming that the U.S. secretly put the Ba'ath in power, but this was the source: "In 1968, Saddam’s Ba’ath party wing took power in Iraq. Immediately, the CIA gave Saddam a list of communists inside Iraq." Obviously, the author of the piece made a typo or else showed a complete lack of understanding of Iraqi history, because the alleged "death list" was provided in 1963 (and is mentioned in the U.S.-Iraq relations article; the U.S. naturally denies that this took place). It is odd that the efforts of Egypt, Syria, and the U.K. to oust Qasim have gone down the memory hole, when they were all more substantial than anything the U.S. allegedly did. There's no room for doubt that the seizures of power by the Ba'ath in Syria in 1966 and in Iraq in 1968 were vehemently opposed by the United States. Even attempting to use the alleged, impossible to prove, contacts with Saddam Hussein in Egypt in the late fifties or early sixties to prove the existence of a vast U.S. conspiracy to support him for many decades is both original research and utterly ludicrous; there's more evidence that Saddam was working with al Qaeda. In truth, the U.S. opposed al-Bakr (by arming the Kurds through Iran and the CIA) for the same reason it opposed Qasim: Both threatened Iran and Kuwait, and were allied with the Soviet Union. Also, this page has the following quote:

The British embassy in Baghdad described Hussein as "the recognized heir-apparent" and "young," with an "engaging smile," "a formidable, single-minded and hard-headed member of the Ba'athist hierarchy, but one with whom, if only one could see more of him, it would be possible to do business".

How this proves U.S. support for anything, I have no idea. It isn't even evidence that the U.K. secretly plotted to help him seize the presidency. Quotes like this were naturally removed because they are unrelated to the subject matter. Because of Wikipedia policy against fringe viewpoints; it is advised that editors use scholarly histories of Iraq and biographies of Saddam Hussein rather than blogs like Common Dreams or other dubious sites. At the very least, while the entire 1959 Ba'athist/Egyptian/Syrian plot did occur as described; the notion that the CIA was involved, side-by-side with Saddam Hussein, is a massive blunder extensively debunked by virtually every historian of Iraq (show me a history book to the contrary) and disproved decades ago by a Congressional investigation—then resurrected in 2003 for obvious political reasons. As mentioned, most of the other allegations have been added to other articles, including Aburish's (in U.S.-Iran relations and United States support for Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war--if you care to check); though with some attempt at balance and neutrality.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:24, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Indeed, there is also this gem from the Saddam Hussein article on Wikipedia:

Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, an Iraqi general and friend of Saddam who defected in 1991, has alleged that the Soviet Union covertly assisted the Iraqi Ba'athists in gaining and holding onto power in the sixties. "I was there helping with the revolution and worked on two occasions with Soviet KGB officials to help train us," he said.[33] For thirty years, the KGB and FSB trained Iraqi secret police; some 70,000 Russian military advisors, many of them intelligence and security specialists, served in Iraq from 1973-2003.[34]

I checked the source, and here is the full quote: "Al-Tikriti dismissed the commonly heard claim that the U.S. helped bring Saddam to power, calling it "absolutely ludicrous." The Baathist revolution, he said, was backed by the Soviet Union because of the shared socialist ideology. "I was there helping with the revolution and worked on two occasions with Soviet KGB officials to help train us, much like the United States did with the Taliban during the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan," he said."TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 09:27, 7 June 2012 (UTC)