How The CIA Made Saddam Hussein His Pet And Killed Him JJ

Saddam Hussein was one of the greatest enemies of the United States in living memory. The Iraqi dictator’s crimes were used as justification for two separate wars, and his name is inseparable from tyranny and violence. What most people don’t know is that Saddam was not always America’s enemy. For years, the United States supported him, from the CIA allegedly helping him to carry out assassination attempts to arming him with the materials for chemical weapons.

In this video, we’ll learn how the United States secretly backed Saddam Hussein for years before turning against him. American support for Saddam is much older than you probably think. Back in 1958, the kingdom of Iraq was overthrown by its own military, led by Abd al-Karim Qasim. Qasim established an independent Iraqi government that tried to avoid committing to either side in the Cold War, preferring to pursue their own course of Iraqi nationalism, which blended Iraqi heritage with Islamic faith and economically socialist policies.

For the United States, Qasim’s government was a better option than the communists, and Qasim tried to stay on good terms with both Washington and Moscow, at least at first. Qasim also rejected Egypt’s Abd al-Nasser’s proposal to join a United Arab Republic made up of Egypt, Iraq, and Syria, preferring his country’s independence.

This too was good for the Americans, who felt that such a union would be an obstacle for their interests in the Middle East. One group who weren’t happy about this, though, were a faction known as the Ba’athists. The Ba’athists were Arab socialists who believed that Arab unity, through things like NASA’s United Arab Republic was best for Arabs.

Ba’athist factions in Syria and Iraq came to hate Qasim’s government. And in 1959, Ba’athists even attempted to assassinate Qasim, but failed. Most of the conspirators then fled the country. Concrete evidence has never been found, but it’s widely believed that the US secretly backed the assassination attempt.

And one of those would-be assassins was a 23-year-old Saddam Hussein. The US became increasingly angry with Qasim in the following years. By 1960, Qasim’s actions like land seizures and warmer relations with the USSR were becoming a major irritant for Washington, but they still believed he was better than any available alternative.

Qasim also ruffled some feathers by declaring that Kuwait belonged to Iraq, a claim that would ultimately become decisive in US-Iraqi relations. Privately, the US assured Kuwait that they supported its independence, but publicly, the Americans refused to comment on the issue and risked alienating Qasim. The issue that finally broke American tolerance of Qasim though was oil.

It was Qasim who hosted a meeting of leading oil-producing nations in September 1960, which resulted in the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC. And by 1961, Qasim passed laws to seize land and facilities from Anglo-American oil companies in his country. Washington had finally had enough. So too had the Iraqi people.

A series of domestic and foreign policy blunders had destroyed support for the government. By 1962, support for the communists had surged. Kurds were in open rebellion, and even the Ba’athists had begun gaining considerable support. One State Department official noted that by late 1962, Qasim was disliked, hated, and privately ridiculed by his entire country.

This unpopularity created perfect conditions for a coup. On February 8th, 1963, the Ba’athists attacked Qasim’s government. Qasim was arrested, put on trial, and executed the next day. For decades, people have accused the CIA of helping to plan and carry out the coup, but no direct evidence of this has ever been found.

The 1963 coup did not usher in a Ba’athist regime like Saddam and other Ba’athists hoped. Iraq fell into years of unstable government and bitter factional conflict. Multiple governments rose and fell, and the Ba’athists themselves split into numerous factions. It was in this conflict that Saddam rose to become one of the leading figures of the movement.

It took until 1968 for things to stabilize and for a more secure Ba’athist government to seize power under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. By now, Saddam was one of the most influential Ba’athists and was appointed as al-Bakr’s vice president. Saddam was a ruthless enforcer for the regime, working to root out and execute alleged spies and political enemies with an iron fist.

He also arranged the downfall of multiple Ba’athist rivals, including the chief of internal state security and the minister of defense, which allowed him to effectively seize control of Iraq’s security forces. The US mostly looked the other way during all this. Diplomatic relations with Iraq had been cut off in 1967 over Iraqi hostility to Israel and did not officially reopen for years.

They saw Iraq as an occasionally irritating but mostly irrelevant power whose own internal instability would prevent it having any meaningful role in Middle Eastern affairs. So long as Iraq didn’t align with the Soviets, Washington didn’t much care about what was going on there. Iraqi-Soviet cooperation to develop their oil industry gave America some concerns and gave Saddam a lot of money.

But this cooperation never evolved into a serious alliance. The US did provide covert aid to the Kurds who were fighting the Iraqi government at the same time that the Soviets were funneling aid to Iraq to help suppress them. As a general rule, if the Soviets backed one side of a conflict, America decided to back the other.

Washington sent millions in aid to the Kurds via Iranian contacts, which allowed them to keep resisting the Iraqi government for years. By the late ’70s though, al-Bakr was old and frail while Saddam had accumulated an immense amount of wealth and power of his own. In July 1979, Saddam was able to strong-arm al-Bakr into resigning and assumed power of the regime for himself.

He immediately purged disloyal Ba’athists and filled the Iraqi government with his own loyalists. It was a brutal move that should have worried the Americans, but they had bigger problems on their hands. Saddam’s seizure of power in 1979 was overshadowed by what happened next door. In January 1979, opposition to the Shah’s government and Western influence in Iran erupted into revolution.

Ruhollah Khomeini, a hardline Islamist, seized power in the Shah’s place and declared a new Islamic republic that had a particular hatred for the United States and its allies. The Iranian revolution was a much bigger concern to Washington than Saddam’s little seizure of power was. Saddam was concerned, too.

His government was secular and the revolution risked encouraging Islamist challenges to his own power. It didn’t help that Saddam’s government was mostly Sunni Muslim, while Iran was now in the hands of fundamentalist Shias. Relations between the two countries collapsed almost immediately. Saddam believed the new Iranian government would try to topple him, an entirely reasonable belief since the Ayatollah openly called for Iraqi Shiites to do exactly that.

On September 22nd, 1980, tensions boiled over when Saddam ordered his army to invade Iran. His goal was to frighten internal enemies, seize disputed territory on the border, and to demonstrate his power on the world stage. He seems to have expected the Iranian regime to crumble under his attack, which didn’t happen.

The Carter administration took a hands-off approach at first. They wanted nothing more than to see the Iranian regime fall, but had little confidence that Saddam would be able to do it. Besides, Carter was still trying to untangle the Iranian hostage crisis, which had begun when the new regime’s agents took US Embassy staff hostage in November 1979.

An invasion only jeopardize those diplomatic efforts, which Carter had made an important part of his image going into the election year. Still, the new government in Tehran quickly accused the United States of encouraging the invasion. Again, no evidence of this claim has ever emerged. And Carter denied that he had any foreknowledge of the attack, let alone influence over the decision.

The Iran-Iraq War was devastating for the region. Saddam initially had the upper hand, cutting deeply in Iranian territory before Iranian counterattacks pushed the war back onto his soil by 1982. The war expanded to include attacks on oil tankers and bombardments of civilian populations by 1985. Unlike Carter, Reagan took a more direct interest in the war.

He recognized the value of the war in undermining the Iranian regime and began slowly rebuilding relations with Baghdad. There were a few reasons for this. Firstly, Iran was performing quite well in the war after the first few months, and there was a real chance they could win. Secondly, Washington was concerned that Iranian successes could encourage similar revolutions elsewhere in the Middle East.

Saddam’s brutality was no secret at this point. America was well aware that Saddam was a brutal dictator who imprisoned opponents and massacred minorities to secure his rule. However, he’d also condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. And communists were among the many internal enemies he crushed. In the Cold War, that was enough for Washington.

In 1981, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Morris Draper visited Baghdad to discuss potential US-Iraqi cooperation. It was the first official visit of US government officials to Iraq since diplomatic relations were broken off in ’67. Nothing concrete was agreed there, but US officials reported that the Iraqis were welcoming and seemed to be open to receiving US support against their enemy.

Further meetings between Iraqi and American officials occurred the following month, again producing no concrete results, but signaling that the two countries might work together. Iraq was also taken off the list of terrorist sponsoring states and provided with loans and credit for internal development, a sign of America’s willingness to work with them.

It should be clear that America’s involvement was entirely concerned with stopping Iran, not raising Iraq. Saddam was seen as a risky but necessary ally to that end. Growing US intervention grew more out of fear of what he might do if left by himself than any genuine support. For example, in 1983, State Department officials were chiefly worried that Saddam might attack the Iranian oil industry and cause global economic problems as a result.

And US involvement in his affairs might hold him back from that. Special Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld met directly with Saddam in Baghdad in December 1983. Rumsfeld and Saddam discussed cooperation against Iran and Syria, with Rumsfeld promising to continue US arms embargoes against Iran, and raising the possibility of US involvement in the Iraqi oil industry.

Saddam was pleased, and the meeting signaled a decisive shift in US-Iraqi relations. The biggest sticking point, however, was chemical weapons. Iran publicly accused Saddam of using them in 1983. And both UN and US investigations determined this was true. Saddam also deployed chemical weapons against the Kurds inside Iraq. Use of chemical weapons was a clear violation of international law.

However, Iran was diplomatically isolated with neither the US nor USSR interested in pushing Iraq on the issue for their sake. The US did formally condemn Iraq’s use of chemical weapons on March 5th, 1984. But it came with caveats. Firstly, the American statement equally condemned the Iranians for the ongoing war.

Secondly, US officials privately assured the Iraqis that they still had US support against Iran despite the use of chemical weapons. Despite knowing about Saddam’s atrocities, Reagan signed agreements permitting the sale of trucks, electronics, and other supposed non-military equipment to Iraq. However, the US did not put much effort into ensuring things were actually being used for non-military purposes.

For example, in April 1984, the Bell Helicopter Textron company sold 25 helicopters to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense with a verbal promise that the Ministry of Defense would not use them militarily. This was good enough for the US government who approved the sale without any investigation. The State Department did step in to stop a US company selling phosphorus fluoride to the Iraqi government, a critical component for making chemical weapons, but insisted that this one plan deal wouldn’t affect a general US strategy of improving trade relations with Saddam’s

regime. US condemnation of Saddam’s chemical weapon use proved to be only a brief blip in improving relations. In November 1984, Reagan ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, even visited Washington and met with Secretary of State George Shultz to herald this new era of cooperation.

Ironically, it wasn’t arms sales to Iraq that caused real trouble, but to Iran. In 1986, Lebanese journalists uncovered that the Reagan administration had actually been secretly selling weapons to Iran the whole time. Apparently, the Reagan administration believed that the arms sales would improve relations with Iran, who would pressure their allies Hezbollah in Lebanon to release American hostages being held there.

Furthermore, the profits from the arms sales were being diverted to support the anti-communist Contra rebels of Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra affair was a major scandal for the Reagan administration at home and a serious blow to US-Iraqi relations. Saddam accused the US of playing both sides and threatened to pull back on their recent diplomatic efforts.

In order to salvage the relationship, Reagan relaxed export restrictions on Iraq and several other Middle Eastern countries, paving the way for more American support for Saddam than ever before. After the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan ramped up support for Iraq. The US Navy increased patrols in the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran and to protect oil shipments at risk from either side.

This included reflagging Kuwaiti ships as American in order to extend US protection to them against Iranian attack and creating a real risk of direct American-Iranian conflict. This was fantastic for Saddam. The extent of America’s commitment to standing by Saddam was proven when things went terribly wrong. On May 17th, 1987, an Iraqi fighter attacked what it believed was an Iranian tanker in the Persian Gulf.

In fact, it was the USS Stark. 37 American lives were lost and the ship was seriously damaged in the attack. But despite this direct attack, Washington’s response was tempered. Saddam insisted it had been a mistake, apologized for the event, and even offered compensation to the families. Reagan accepted the apology and promised that the incident would not spoil improving relations between the countries.

Washington was too committed to supporting Saddam to let a few dead sailors get in the way. Most concerningly, the US also began supplying materials to create missiles to Saddam. After both sides ramped up attacks on civilians in 1988, it was discovered that Iraq was using locally built Al Hussein missiles to hit Iranian cities.

These missiles had significantly more range than the Soviet-built missiles Saddam had used earlier in the war and were almost certainly made using materials purchased from the United States. The Reagan administration’s commitment to Saddam didn’t waver even as accusations of war crimes mounted. Starting in 1986, Saddam waged an aggressive campaign against Kurdish communities as punishment for their alleged support of Iran.

The Al Anfal campaign from 1986 to 1989, so Iraqi forces destroyed thousands of Kurdish villages and killed tens of thousands of Kurds. By 1988, it was beyond question that Saddam had been using mustard gas against Kurdish civilians, which prompted the Senate to vote for sanctions on the Saddam regime.

Reagan, along with donors in the oil industry, ensured the bill was never passed. US support for Saddam even brought atrocities of their own. In summer 1988, the US naval forces in the Persian Gulf were in frequent skirmishes with the Iranian navy. On July 3rd, a tragic mirror of the attack on the USS Stark came when the USS Vincennes shot down what it believed was an Iranian military plane.

In fact, it was Iran Air Flight 655 flying to Dubai. All 290 civilians on board were killed. The United States never issued an apology, and the Vincennes’ captain not only kept his job, but was even given a Legion of Merit for his service. The downing of Flight 655 may have been the final straw that pushed Iran to accept a UN ceasefire resolution two weeks later, bringing an end to the Iran-Iraq War.

Half a million people had lost their lives over eight years, and neither side made any meaningful gains. US support for Saddam through the war had allowed it to become extremely powerful. With US-supplied weapons and materials, Saddam had built one of the largest militaries in the Middle East, boasting 1 million men and over 6,000 tanks by 1989.

His stockpiles of chemical weapons and WMDs were significant, too. He’d also proven he was happy to use them on internal rivals and persecuted minorities in his own borders, as well as to attack rival nations. Despite confirmation of his humanitarian crimes, by the end of the war, the US government had come to see Saddam as a reliable leader who might bring long-term stability to Iraq and the Middle East as a whole.

They had to believe that, or else they’d have a lot to answer for. George H.W. Bush’s administration tried to keep Saddam under control and on side, but years encouraging Saddam’s aggressive tendencies and giving him the tools he needed to fulfill them had left them with a problem of their own making. Despite diplomatic efforts, a billion dollars in farming subsidies, and hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, Saddam quickly became uncontrollable and a massive headache for Washington.

Hopes for improving US-Iraqi relations barely lasted a year after the war until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait. Only now did the Bush administration realize that Saddam could not be contained diplomatically. The UN condemned the invasion, and later that year the US would lead coalition forces in Operation Desert Storm to defeat Saddam’s armies on the battlefield.

US forces found themselves facing an enemy they themselves had helped to build, and losing lives against weapons that American politicians had put in Iraqi hands. American support of Saddam proved that no one can escape the consequences of their bad decisions forever. America had turned a blind eye to Saddam’s atrocities for the sake of their own agenda, and it would cost thousands of American lives trying to solve a problem that they themselves had helped to create.