Sunday, December 31, 2006

One of the most depressing sights of the entire Saddam postmortem were the clips shown ad nauseam of all the dignitaries, diplomats, and obsequious reporters who in years past trekked to Baghdad to flatter or to pay homage to this creepy mass murderer. Watching a younger Kofi Annan, Lindberg like, pump Saddam's hand, smiling and offering blandishments was sickening. Surely the world can learn from this sordid spectacle, and not repeat the same mistake with Ahmadinejad and Assad. Their demise will come soon enough, and only the clips and outtakes of the appeasers will remain.

It is getting so that the cheap anti-American rhetoric from Europe and the Middle East about our purported complicity in killing a mass murderer should be worn as a badge of honor. We caught him, turned him over for a transparent trial, and ensured he would never murder again. So the question remains: where is the true morality-building this killer's bunkers, selling him weapons, taking his oil-or putting him in a noose?

Perhaps the most memorable of these roles came during the Reagan administration, when Rumsfeld was named special presidential envoy to the Middle East. According to the Washington Post and others, Rumsfeld was a major proponent of the Reagan administration's support of Iraq and its dictator Saddam Hussein.

As a conciliatory gesture, the U.S. removed Iraq from its list of state sponsors of terrorism in 1982, paving the way for Rumsfeld to visit Baghdad in 1983, about the midpoint of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war.

At the time, intelligence reports indicated the Iraqis were using illegal chemical weapons against Iran "almost daily." During several trips to Iraq, Rumsfeld told government officials that the U.S. would consider an Iraqi loss to Iran a major strategic defeat. In a personal meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983, Rumsfeld told the Butcher of Baghdad that the U.S. wanted to restore full diplomatic relations with Iraq.

In 2002, Rumsfeld tried to put a gloss on this meeting by claiming that he warned Hussein against using banned weapons, but that claim was unsupported by the State Department's notes on the meeting.

As a result of the openings created by Rumsfeld's diplomatic triumphs, U.S. companies were recruited and encouraged, both covertly and overtly, to ship poisonous chemicals and biological agents to Iraq, by the administrations of both Reagan and George Bush Sr.. Care packages to Saddam included sample strains of anthrax and bubonic plague, and components which would be used to develop nerve poisons like sarin gas and ricin.