Saddam's regime was put in place with CIA

Let us imagine that you are a businessman, and you hire an employee. At first he works well, but later starts defrauding you and stealing money. Then you have to fire him, and in serious cases to start legal procedures against him. This is what happened to these saddams, noriegas and other garbage. They have forgotten who is the boss. And they were fired.

What if the businessman hires an employee that is a known criminal? Honest businessmen shouldn't hire criminals to begin with.

Steissd, I think your analogy, while it is doubtless exactly how these people's American handlers think of them, and with equal dispassion, is essentially dishonest - for exactly the reason that Violet Lake has given.

These men were not innocent, reasonable people while they were sponsored by the CIA and/or the US Government, who tragically turned bad, as you well know. They were busy doing what they do then, too.

Leaving aside the whole possible debate about political morality (which I suppose the proponents of real-politik see as an oxymoron, anyway) it would seem, at the very least, appalling (though, I suppose, not surprising) hypocrisy for the US suddenly to begin condemning these men on the basis of morality and how they treat their people!

By the way, I do not think that Saddam was brought to power by the CIA. He was one of the leaders of the military coup that replaced the previous ruler general Aref in 1968. The coup brought to power Ahmad Hassan al-Baqr, Saddam was a vice-president, and he came to power after al-Baqr's death in 1979. Saddam got certain assistance from the USA in course of the Irano-Iraqi war, since fundamentalist Iran was openly hostile toward the USA. But this does not mean that Saddam's regime was a permanent strategic partner of the USA in the Middle East; he had chances to become the one, but Saddam preferred to act as if there were no boss above him...

steissd, here's something you might find interesting:

I guess what distresses me most about this is that I don't expect anything better of the U.S. government. I knew a few CIA agents in my teens. Their children talked fairly openly and proudly of the 'interventions' their parents had been involved with. This is business done the CIA way. It doesn't matter if the rotter you put in business is a rotter, as long as he's your rotter. Buggers.

This entire business of using people, or regimes, for very shortterm, limited in scope, goals, regardless of other usually negative attributes of such an entity, makes me sick to my stomach. Have we learned nothing from past actions in this regard? Even if we (i.e., a government) do not act on principles that are open and agreed to by all citizens, that does not excuse our not learning from our past similar actions, and the negative consequences which eventually override the original shortterm intent of usage. Buggers indeed.

And Iran was a monster of the CIA's making also. They founded and trained (if this is the correct word) the Shah's secret police SAVAK - as bad as any of Sadaam's torturers. The idea being to deflect the Soviet connections of Iraq!! Out goes the Shah, so they fund the torturers and murderers of Iraq against the Iranians! Then there's covert operations to help the Iranians in a war with the Iraqis! Lots of lovely death, murder, rapine and torture all funded by the American taxpayer. Reads like a bad novel by Tom Clancy.

Then you'll agree that the Anglosaxons and Israeli's are not in their right to do as they want either, right? Or is there an ubermensch-theory that gives us more rights over the planetary community than Arabs?

I'm in your pack, Wolf.

aoooooo oooo !

Communism was (and still is) used as a threat by politicians with other goals. The USSR was not half the threat they painted it to be -- and having that "threat" was extremely useful to the defense industry and those who walked through the revolving doors between government and corporation. Iraq is another whipping boy and chances are that this administration's rush to get in there and contain it are related not to finding WMD's but to search out and destroy all the carefully kept records (Iraqis loved paper trails) of US complicity in weapons and other programs.

And now we zip across the world to North Korea to introduce the folks at home to the newest threat to the Free World! To all our competitors from Afghanistan and Iraq we'll bid them a fond farewell and hope they can get another chance to play again!