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It was only when he wasn't doing what we wanted anymore that we had a problem with him, it was nothing to do with morality.
Exactly.
Get it in your head once and for all Walkindude.
Saddam was always trouble yes, looking at his police files will tell you that but he did actually get worse over time, more paranoid, more encircled, more abusive of his people and wanting to rule the arab nations more. That is fact.
Jeebus. :rolleyes:
Totally irrelevent.
Did he start off as a nice, quiet guy, good to his mum and keeper of pets, or was he a heartless shit, murderer and alround evil motherfucker who no one sane would touch with a barge pole?
Learn to think ffs man.
its his actions in office that changed so my staement was accurate.
And I could post pictures of Chirac shaking his hands. Come to that I could post pictures of the Queen shaking hands with various Communist leaders - doesn't mean the Queen supported communism. Mugabe has shaken hands with Straw and Prince Charles - hardly shows they're supporters of Mugabe's land grab.
You meet a foreign head of state, you shake hands with him. Its diplomacy.
From day one he was an evil tyrant. He was an evil bastard long before he got there as well.
It invalidates your entire point.
He was born evil?
Well the Soviets weren't too pissed by Saddam either
1973 Soviet Arms sales to Iraq 1.3bn, US 0
1980 Soviet 1.65 bn US 0
1988 Soviet 1.2 bn US 125m
It's all a matter of record and beyond any doubt. I hope you're not going to turn into some kind of lunatic neocon revisionist all of the sudden.
Off topic so appologies: Are you a fan of the works Jean-Jacques Rousseau at all? If not i think you'd really enjoy reading some of his books
Both suppositions are entirely false. He was Britain and America's golden boy in the Middle East as Voodoo Ray has appropriately described it, and he continued to be so after he used chemical weapons on the Iranians and the Kurds.
Don't pretend it was any different.
I haven't. Thank you for the tip.
So they were willing to trade with Iraq, do you think that makes them allies?
No worries, I'm reading a condensed version of "The Social Contract" at the moment. I reckon it'd be really up your street.
If you sell weapons to someone its usually a good sign that you're not hostile to them.
And of course it depends what you mean by allies. The surest sign of alliance is sending troops to support them - they obviously weren't that strong allies as there were no Soviet troops in Iraq, but then there weren't any US forces there.
So the US supplies hardly any weaponary, puts no soldiers on the ground, doesn't provide any serious training and is part of a multi-national forces protecting tankers from both Iraq and Iran.
Two years after the end of the Iran-Iraq war it leads a multi-national force against Saddam.
Well, I'm not sure if the USSR was an ally (probably not), but I'm even less convinced the US was.
This guy?
That looks like exactly the book i'm currently reading!
Intelligence for instance is a priceless aid.
Some would say chemical weapons and know-how on their production are also a valuable asset to be given by the helpful yanks.
The US has played a critical and all-important role in overthrowing democracies and regimes all over the world without providing a single soldier and not much in the way of weapons at all (Latin America being a prime example). It's certainly not as simple as producing a weapons inventory and see who has sold the more bullets to a tyrant. I suspect the US was a far more important and critical ally to Saddam Hussein than anyone else, even if the Americans didn't sell him as many conventional weapons as others.
I'm not sure he'll agree with all of it either, still it'd be boring to read a whole book agreeing with everything put forward.
I think there are a number of sections on acquisition by force and slavery that he'd enjoy though.
What intelligence? Did it provide training to Iraqi forces? Even the WMD equipment was dual use, with emphasis on the word dual and much of it had been supplied to many other countries as well as Iraq and plenty of other countries were also inmvolved in selling them chemicals etc.
We know the US undertook operations against Iran and its allies (such as Hezbollah), but then so did the USSR. The fact of a common enemy doesn't make people allies.
You may suspect a lot - it doesn't mean its true and the evidence we do know (eg weapon's sales, the liberation of Kuwait) does not paint a picture of two regimes which were chummy.
Now you're probably right if you're saying that the US didn't give a fuck about Saddam when he was torturing and killing his own people, but that's a different thing from saying he was there key ally (which also ignores that Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, the UAE, and in later years Egypt were much closer to the US, to say nothing of Israel).