Once again

Once again I was clicking my way through varoius news sites, when i stumbled across an article about Saddam's trial. And it has finally confirmed my suscpicions that the whole thing is a big sham. I've copied the part the kind of upset me the most.




"What the world now expects Saddam to reveal in court ... is hitherto unheard details of how the U.S. perhaps nudged him into invading Iran in 1980 and ... kept his military replenished with weapons and technology that helped him sustain the war for eight years while serving the American goal of destroying Iran's firepower that was deemed a threat to the region and, eventually, [to] Israel." (Jordan Times)

If, though, "every time he's accused of some horrible act," Saddam does "blame the West for being behind most of the dreadful events that took place under his reign," he may well "have a point," wrote noted commentator Neil Mackay in Scotland's Sunday Herald. After all, "Britain and America armed Saddam with weapons of mass destruction during the 1980s, and the U.S. encouraged him to hammer the Iranians. The U.S. hated the revolutionary fundamentalist regime that took control of Tehran in 1979 and [was] determined to do anything to undermine it -- including allowing Saddam ... to unleash chemical weapons against the Iranians."

Indeed, Iran's Mehr News Agency reported, during the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war, "the current U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, [who then served as a special envoy of the Reagan administration,] met with Saddam in Baghdad, assuring him of U.S. backing." A news analyst for Lebanon's Daily Star cited a 2002 Washington Post news story that reported that, at the time, the United States knew Saddam "was using chemical weapons on an 'almost daily' basis in defiance of international conventions." The newspaper also noted that the Reagan administration authorized the sale to Iraq of poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses that had military uses. (Washington Post, quoted in the Daily Star)

But why did Washington want to support Saddam in what turned out to be a long, miserable war with little victory to speak of on either side? According to The Daily Star's analysis, "The U.S. [had] removed Iraq from the State Department's terrorism list in 1982, two years after the start of the ... Iran-Iraq war. Washington sought a rapprochement with Saddam after ... Reagan's administration perceived a possible Iranian victory over Iraq as a destabilizing factor in the [Persian] Gulf, which would [have] threaten[ed] U.S. oil supplies."

Now Iran's government is angry that, at his arraignment, Saddam was charged with numerous crimes (BBC), including the gassing of Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988 and invading Kuwait in 1990, but not for starting the war with Iran.

Iran's former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said, "If the Iraqi court refuses to include [Saddam's responsibility for] unleashing ... the war against Iran, it means it is [doing so] on an order from the Americans. Why is the war against Kuwait, which only lasted several months, among the major charges, while the war against Iran, which lasted eight years, is omitted?" (Daily Star)





It is obvious that the Bush administration is just saving its own fucking ass. I mean couldn't they put Rumsfield and Bush Sr. on trial for the whole Iran-Iraq War. Weren't we the ones supplying the weapons and encouraging the whole thing!?!

I am deeply ashamed.