How west helped Saddam gain power and decimate the Iraqi elite

[RBHam]

By Mohamoud A Shaikh
http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/features98/saddam.htm

Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured - a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.

The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest - far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.

The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.

The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them - including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.

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[starroute]

1. Lots of nasty stuff in that 1963-65 period

Vietnam. Indonesia. Repeated plots against Castro. South Africa (where, as I recall, the CIA was involved in the arrest of Nelson Mandela.) Now a very similar pattern described for Iraq. The common thread is not just meddling in other countries' affairs, but the the extreme high-handedness with which it was carried out.

I don't recall ever seeing a clear explanation of what was going on during those years. Was the CIA just running amok? Or had the Kennedy administration decided that the less risky alternative to direct confrontations with the Soviets was to up the level of covert interventions?

If anyone knows of a good source on this particular period, I'd like to hear of it. Liberals tend to go easy on US foreign policies during the JFK and early LBJ years, but there was a quality of James-Bond-worshipping ruthlessness then that I can't recall being equalled either before or since.

Also, I have the feeling that the roots of much of what has happened since may be buried back then -- from the Kennedy and subsequent assassinations, to Nixon's comeback after 1962 and the endorsement of dirty tricks, to the rise of the BFEE -- all tied in with the CIA and with the most unsavory components of US foreign and domestic associations.

I often see threads here asking variations of the question, "Where did it all go wrong?" Most of them focus on the Republicans -- but that may be a red herring. I think things really went wrong in this country in 1963-65, and I want to know the details.