For Whom the Bell Tolls: Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein

Juan Cole at Informed Comment has ten ways that the US aided and abbetted Saddam Hussain

1) The first time the US enabled Saddam Hussein came in 1959. In that year, a young Saddam, from the boondock town of Tikrit but living with an uncle in Baghdad, tried to assassinate Qasim. He failed and was wounded in the leg. Saddam had, like many in his generation, joined the Baath Party, which combined socialism, Arab nationalism, and the aspiration for a one-party state.

In 1959, Richard Sale of UPI reports,

' According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.

[...]

CIA involvement in the 1959 assassination attempt is plausible. Historian David Wise says there is evidence in the US archives that the CIA's "Health Alteration Committee" tried again to have Qasim assassinated in 1960 by "sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief."

2) After the failed coup attempt, Saddam fled to Cairo, where he attended law school in between bar brawls, and where it is alleged that he retained his CIA connections there, being put on a stipend by the agency via the Egyptian government. He frequently visited US operatives at the Indiana Cafe. Getting him back on his feet in Cairo was the second episode of US aid to Saddam.

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