-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Kassem [...] took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, > [..] 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.
So in your version of reality, the Iraqi people were happily enjoying socialism, loving the socialism this benevolent Kassem provided to them and then this evil capitalistic CIA agent, Saddam, took it all away from them.
If that is what happened, what is your objection then to him being given to Iraqi people for execution? Why are you calling for him to be released, or to be given to his fellow tyrants who run the Hague court, who certainly will not execute him, probably will not imprison him for very long, and might well exonerate him?
You are apparently so wrapped up in seeing this in some pre-conceived way, as to not grasp the obvious, literal meaning of what you read. Kassem was a pro-arab nationalist, who nationalized (as in seized, without compensation) formerly foreign corporate oil interests. Kassem was ANTI-western, anti-American, do you get it? THAT is why Saddam had been recruited by CIA for the original (failed) assassination attempt. After that, he fled Iraq, for Egypt. Later, after the CIA successfully had Kassem assassinated, then Saddam returned to Iraq, and eventually installed himself (with US blessing) as Dictator/president. Kassem was highly popular with the Iraqi public, who were we to say otherwise, and have him killed for power/profit considerations? In doing so, for our interests, the Iraqi people suffered decades of tyranny under Saddam. Do you understand our involvement in that? More historical facts for the memory hole...
I don't much care to exonerate him, martyr him or anysuch nonsense. However, if he is ALL THAT YOU RANT about, then he would obviously be convicted of his crimes in a fair and open court. To reduce it to a kangeroo court and a lynching as you propose is to delegitamize such action.
As Tim May has already pointed out, what direct threat has Saddam posed to us suddenly that required us to attack him (as well as cause all the collateral casualties of innocents who didn't even support Saddam?). To punish the Iraqi people for the actions of their leaders ( 2 wars and 12 years of sanctions, no less) ... is just as much terrorism as Bin Laden punishing the US by attacking civilian Americans in the "homeland".
It was an excellent point Tim made though, that if you feel so strongly about intervening militarily in the affairs of others who have not directly come here and attacked you (like Saddam) then you ought to enlist and start fighting. I still can't figure out your obsessive and false connexion between Saddam and the Sept.11 attacks (besides Bush's widely disseminated, baseless media propagated innuendo which misled ignorant US citizens to believe otherwise). What ever did happen to Bin Laden? Are we REALLY any safer today than before Sept.11th? (Fade to Code Orange for Xmas/New Years) Is it possible to defend such a large empire, always, everywhere? (hint: Sun Tzu's "Art of War" provides the historical answer here) Or is the true path to security and peace (in the longer term) based on mutual respect of societies and cultures. I posit the only true solution will be to remove the motivation for the attacks: a non-interventionist policy that trades with all, and wars with none, except any that directly ATTACKS the US. When we threw the English out of the US in our revolution, WE THE PEOPLE did it, not some foreign "liberation force" coming to save us yocals. Any people desiring freedom from intolerable restraint will take the same action, without requiring external nations to intervene and get the ball rolling. Unfortunately, the US has an extensive and well documented history around the world of supporting/arming/protecting dictators, even from their own people who may be revolting against them in armed rebellion.
You can, in your ignorance, ignore the well established and documented history of covert CIA operations, leading to the installation of brutal dictators (like Saddam, like the return of the Shah in Iran, like most of the coups in S.America, like Pinochet in Chile, etc etc etc), but your belief does not make any of that history any less real. Experiencing some severe cognitive dissonance between the media-reinforced "myths" and the "actual realities", are we?
I also don't understand your contempt of the ICC Hague. The US has not signed the treaty, for fear of US personnel and officials being treated by the same standard as everyone else, in regards the commission of war crimes. Why not pass the buck to them... do you REALLY think they'd just "let him go" (I doubt it). And then this way America cannot be implicated in the injustice of a mock kangeroo trial and execution, which will only further motivate anti-US global resistance like al Qaeda.
-Max
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James A. Donald
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Secrecy is the cornerstone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mightily little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked; Contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; The most you can do is kill him.
-Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100
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