| Author | Message | | Guest | | Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2002 10:08 am Post subject: Cheney and Rumsfeld Didn't Mind Saddam |
| Cheney didn't mind Saddam
Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times
Saturday, October 12, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/73454.htm
Monster of the month
NEW YORK George W. Bush and Dick Cheney portray Saddam Hussein as so menacing and terrifying that one might think they have lain awake at night for years worrying about him. But when Cheney was running Halliburton, the oil services firm, it sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company did.
As was first reported by the Financial Times on Nov. 3, 2000, Halliburton subsidiaries submitted $23.8 million worth of contracts with Iraq to the United Nations in 1998 and 1999 for approval by its sanctions committee.
This was legitimate business conducted through joint ventures that had been acquired as part of a larger takeover in September 1998. Zelma Branch, a Halliburton spokeswoman, says the subsidiaries completed their pre-existing Iraq contracts but did not seek new ones.
So this is not evidence of scandalous conduct or egregious misjudgment. But as Americans debate whether to go to war with Iraq, it is a useful reminder of how fashions change in perceptions of rogue states. Public Enemy No. 1 today is a government that Cheney was in effect helping shore up just a couple of years ago.
More broadly, the United States has a long history in which Saddam, although just as monstrous as he is today, was coddled. In the 1980s it provided his army with satellite intelligence so that it could use chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. When Saddam used nerve gas and mustard gas against Kurds in 1988, the Reagan administration initially tried to blame Iran. The United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988.
These days it sees Iraq as an imminent threat to its way of life, while just a couple of years ago Iraq was perceived as a pathetic dictatorship hardly worth the bother of bombing. What changed? Not Iraq, but rather American sensibilities after Sept. 11.
We Americans need to be wary that we are not just pursuing the latest fashion in monsters. Iran was the menace of the 1980s, so we snuggled up with Iraq. The Soviet threat led us to cuddle with Islamic fundamentalists like those now trying to blow us up.
In 1994 the vogue threat changed, and hawks pressed hard for a military confrontation with North Korea. America came within an inch of going to war with North Korea, in a conflict that a Pentagon study found would have killed a million people. In retrospect, it is clear that the hawks were wrong about confronting North Korea. Containment and deterrence so far have worked, kind of, just as they have kind of worked to restrain Iraq for 11 years.
If Washington spent money on hypocrisy detectors as well as anthrax detectors, they would be buzzing. For example, Republicans are trying to defeat the Democratic senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota by running commercials featuring Saddam Hussein.
When I was writing from Iraq lately, some peeved readers suggested I stay there for good. The fact is that neither Tim Johnson nor any lily-livered columnist ever bolstered Saddam's government the way Vice President Cheney did - perfectly legitimately - in 1998 and 1999.
Before they prepare to go to war, Americans need to take a deep breath and make sure they are doing so to overcome a threat that is real and enduring, not one that they are conjuring in part out of the trauma of Sept. 11.
Old monsters like Libya, North Korea and Iran have proved - well, not ephemeral, but at least changeable, less terrifying today than they used to be. And the Iraqi threat, for which Americans are now prepared to sacrifice hundreds or thousands of American casualties, just a few years ago was simply another tinhorn dictatorship where CEO Cheney was earning his bonus.
Also, access the following article to see how Rumsfeld was the Envoy to Saddam when the US was providing Saddam with the material to make check
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=340836 | |  | | Guest | | Posted: Tue Oct 15, 2002 9:03 am Post subject: NEWSWEEK: Cheney Blocks 9-11 Probe |
| NEWSWEEK: Cheney Blocks 9-11 Probe
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t r u t h o u t | 10.14
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t r u t h o u t | 10.13
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t r u t h o u t | 10.12
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t r u t h o u t | 10.11
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t r u t h o u t | 10.10
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t r u t h o u t | 10.09
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t r u t h o u t | 10.08
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t r u t h o u t| 10.07
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t r u t h o u t | 10.06
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t r u t h o u t | 10.05
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t r u t h o u t | 10.04
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---
Reader Comments : <mailto:COMMENTS@truthout.com> | | | | Guest | | Posted: Mon Oct 21, 2002 3:42 am Post subject: When Cheney was a Dove on Iraq |
| http://slate.msn.com/?id=2072609
Dick Cheney, Dove More on why Bush père's defense secretary didn't want to
go to Baghdad. By Timothy Noah Posted Wednesday, October 16, 2002, at 4:53
PM PT
Violating a core precept of journalism, Chatterbox put the most interesting
part of yesterday's item at the bottom. It was a Dick Cheney quote that
Patrick Tyler included in a New York Times story published April 13, 1991,
a little more than a month after the shooting stopped in the Gulf war. The
quote was interesting because it examined hard questions about overthrowing
Saddam Hussein that James Fallows addresses in the November Atlantic
Monthly-questions that Cheney (then defense secretary, now vice president)
no longer shows the slightest interest in as the nation prepares to go to
war with Iraq once again. Violating another core precept of journalism,
Chatterbox will repeat the Cheney quote in full:
If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go
to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it.
It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one
that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime
or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that
tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that
government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when
it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to
protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it
once we leave?
Now, you might argue that Cheney was just being a loyal Cabinet member,
advancing arguments of his commander in chief that he didn't particularly
agree with. The trouble with this interpretation is that Cheney expressed
similar sentiments five years later in a Gulf War documentary produced for
PBS's Frontline. Describing the decision to end the war on Feb. 27, 1991-a
cease-fire took effect the next day, and for the most part the United
States stuck with it-Cheney said:
A: [T]here was no sense, I don't believe on the part of any of us who were
there that day that there was any disagreement with this approach. There
might have been some different views down further in the ranks-General
McCaffrey and the guys in the 24th fought a major engagement the day after
the cease-fire obviously against a brigade of Iraqi Republican Guard. But
there was no sense at that time that there was any different point of view
that we ought to keep the conflict going much longer. ...
Q: You were comfortable personally with this?
A: I was.
[...]
[A few weeks later, when the uprisings occurred among the Shi'a in the
South and the Kurds in the North,] I was not an enthusiast about getting
U.S. forces and going into Iraq. We were there in the southern part of Iraq
to the extent we needed to be there to defeat his forces and to get him out
of Kuwait, but the idea of going into Baghdad, for example, or trying to
topple the regime wasn't anything I was enthusiastic about. I felt there
was a real danger here that you would get bogged down in a long drawn-out
conflict, that this was a dangerous, difficult part of the world; if you
recall we were all worried about the possibility of Iraq coming apart, the
Iranians restarting the conflict that they'd had in the eight-year bloody
war with the Iranians and the Iraqis over eastern Iraq. We had concerns
about the Kurds in the north, the Turks get very nervous every time we
start to talk about an independent Kurdistan.
Plus there was the notion that you were going to set yourself a new war aim
that we hadn't talked to anybody about. That you hadn't gotten Congress to
approve, hadn't talked to the American people about. You're going to find
yourself in a situation where you've redefined your war aims and now set up
a new war aim that in effect would detract from the enormous success you
just had. What we set out to do was to liberate Kuwait and to destroy his
offensive capability, that's what I said repeatedly in my public
statements. That was the mission I was given by the President. That's what
we did. Now you can say, well, you should have gone to Baghdad and gotten
Saddam. I don't think so. [Italics Chatterbox's.] I think if we had done
that we would have been bogged down there for a very long period of time
with the real possibility we might not have succeeded.
In the 1996 interview, Cheney actually managed to out-dove today's liberals
who oppose going to war (by now, you should remember, Cheney was chairman
of Halliburton, an oil-drilling company that did extensive business in the
Islamic world) by suggesting that Saddam's ouster would have little
beneficial effect:
[I]f Saddam wasn't there, his successor probably wouldn't be notably
friendlier to the United States than he is. I also look at that part of the
world as of vital interest to the United States; for the next hundred years
it's going to be the world's supply of oil. We've got a lot of friends in
the region. We're always going to have to be involved there. Maybe it's
part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems
nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you
win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn't work that way in the
Middle East; it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime [italics
Chatterbox's].
Now, Chatterbox won't dispute that life has changed in many ways since
1991. Back then, it seemed reasonable to assume that Saddam had no future
in Iraq. By 1996, though, it was clear that Saddam had consolidated his
power. He hadn't yet expelled the U.N. weapons inspectors-that occurred two
years later-but he wasn't being especially cooperative, either. Why was
invading Iraq at the bottom of Cheney's agenda back then, but at the top of
it now? | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
