Enabling Saddam

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In an important post, a must-read, Juan Cole presents the top ten ways the U.S. enabled Saddam throughout his tyrannical rule of Iraq. Make sure to read it in full, but here's a key passage:

The tendency to treat Saddam and Iraq in a historical vacuum, and in isolation from the superpowers,... has hidden from Americans their own culpability in the horror show that has been Iraq for the past few decades. Initially, the US used the Baath Party as a nationalist foil to the Communists. Then Washington used it against Iran. The welfare of Iraqis themselves appears to have been on no one's mind, either in Washington or in Baghdad.

But when it suited the U.S. to to war against Saddam, both in 1991 and in 2003, all that culpability was conveniently ignored. And when it suited the U.S. to allow Saddam to be executed following a farce of a trial that conveniently did not address that culpability, well, you know what happened.

How convenient.