I had to go and look...

U.S.-Iraq Policy: Recent Military Attacks
Volume 1, Number 3
October 1996
Written by Phyllis Bennis, IPS Fellow
Editors: Tom Barry (IRC) and Martha Honey (IPS)
"Washington's problem is not with Saddam Hussein per se," observed University of Massachusetts political scientist Naseer Aruri, "but primarily with Iraq's potential as an independent regional power, which might someday try to opt for strategic deterrence vis a vis Israel, and which might also challenge America's custodianship over Arab oil in the future."

Arab states in the region have long suspected that Washington's real intention is to break up Iraq. This prospect has generated deep fears in the region that Iran will come out the winner, and that the sovereignty of other Arab states might also be at risk. Although some Arabs would like to see the demise of the Iraqi regime, they do not equate that with the disintegration of Iraq.
http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol2/v2n4oil.html

Saddam's Hidden History
by Joel Bleifuss
In These Times magazine, January 2004
* In 1959 the CIA put Saddam Hussein on its covert operations payroll. The CIA wanted to assassinate then-lraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim, who was buying weapons from the Soviet Union and putting Iraqi communists in positions of power. To that end, the agency hired Saddam, then 22, and five other men. The hit failed because Saddam began firing too soon, wounding Qasim and killing his driver.
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* In 1982, the Reagan administration, though officially neutral, began to fear an Iranian victory. In a 1995 affidavit in a federal criminal court case, Howard Teicher, a one-time member of Reagan's National Security Council staff, said that in 1982 he helped draft a secret National Security Decision Directive, signed by Reagan, to provide covert support to Iraq.
Teicher wrote, "The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of and assisted in the sale of non-U.S.-origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq." The Reagan administration also began providing Saddam Hussein's military with satellite photos of the battlefield and dual-use technology that Iraq used to build chemical and biological weapons. And the Reagan administration allowed Iraq to buy computer software that Saddam could use to track political opponents
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* In 1986, then Vice President George H.W. Bush encouraged Saddam, through Arab intermediaries, to strike Iran harder, according to a November 2, 1992 New Yorker story by Murray Waas and Craig Unger. Indeed, that year, the Iraqi air force began to bomb civilian neighborhoods in Tehran and other cities. The United States allegedly desired an intensified bombing to make Iran more dependent on U.S. supplies of anti-aircraft parts to defend their cities. Such spare parts were an integral part of the Reagan administration's illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/Saddam%27s_Hidden_History.html

U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationships
with Iraq 1980 - 1990
by Nathaniel Hurd
July 15, 2000 (updated 12 December 12, 2001 by Nathaniel Hurd and Glen Rangwala).
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Analysts recognized that "civilian" helicopters can be weaponized in a matter of hours and selling a civilian kit can be a way of giving military aid under the guise of civilian assistance.<8> Shortly after removing Iraq from the terrorism sponsorship list, the Reagan administration approved the sale of 60 Hughes helicopters.<9> Later, and despite some objections from the National Security Council (NSC), the Secretaries of Commerce and State (George Baldridge and George Shultz) lobbied the NSC advisor into agreeing to the sale to Iraq of 10 Bell helicopters,<10> officially for crop spraying. See "1988" for note on Iraq using U.S. Helicopters to spray Kurds with chemical weapons.
Later in the year the Reagan Administration secretly began to allow Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Egypt to transfer to Iraq U.S. howitzers, helicopters, bombs and other weapons.<11> Reagan personally asked Italy's Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti to channel arms to Iraq.<12>

1984
The SD announced on 6 March that, based on "available evidence," it "concluded" that Iraq used "lethal chemical weapons" (specifically mustard gas) in fresh fighting with Iran.<13> On 20 March, U.S. intelligence officials said that they had "what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites for mass-producing the lethal chemical warfare agent".<14>
European-based doctors examined Iranian troops in March 1984 and confirmed exposure to mustard gas.<15> The UN sent expert missions to the battle region in March 1984, February/March 1986, April/May 1987, March/April 1988, July 1988 (twice), and mid-August 1988. These missions detailed and documented Iraq's CW use.<16>
According to the Washington Post, the CIA began in 1984 secretly to give Iraq intelligence that Iraq uses to "calibrate" its mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. In August, the CIA establishes a direct Washington-Baghdad intelligence link, and for 18 months, starting in early 1985, the CIA provided Iraq with "data from sensitive U.S. satellite reconnaissance photography...to assist Iraqi bombing raids." The Post's source said that this data was essential to Iraq's war effort.<17>
The United States re-established full diplomatic ties with Iraq on 26 November,<18> just over a year after Iraq's first well-publicized CW use and only 8 months after the UN and U.S. reported that Iraq used CWs on Iranian troops.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/US_Relation_Iraq_1980-90.html

Special Report
January, 2001
The Gulf War: Eight Myths
By Stephen Zunes
http://www.fpif.org/papers/8myths/index.html

http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_1561173,00.html
Speakout: America's shameful Mideast history
By Wadi Muhaisen, Special to the News
November 22, 2002
n 1953, the democratically elected and wildly popular Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup ostensibly because of his plans to nationalize that country's petroleum resources which were in the hands of British and U.S. oil interests.

The U.S.-sponsored coup brought the reviled monarch, Shah Reza Pahlavi, to absolute power. In 1976, Amnesty International declared that the Shah's CIA-trained and equipped security force, SAVAK, had the worst human rights record on the planet. In 1979, the Shah's U.S.-backed, 26-year dictatorship ended when pent-up frustration and civil unrest exploded onto the streets of Tehran. This spontaneous popular uprising was later commandeered by anti-American cleric Ayatollah Khomeini.

In 1958, Gen. Abdel Karim Qassem of Iraq led a revolution toppling the British-installed monarchy and ushered in land, health-care and education reforms. He also spoke of wresting control of the country's oil reserves from Western corporations.
In 1959, Qassem survived an assassination attempt by Ba'ath Party activists; notable among them was a man by the name of Saddam Hussein.
Living in exile after the attempt on Qassem's life, Saddam was a frequent guest at the American Embassy in Cairo as the U.S. grew increasingly concerned over Qassem's oil industry nationalization plans and overtures to the Soviet Union.
In 1963, Qassem was overthrown - with the help of the CIA's electronic command center in Kuwait - by a coalition of army officers and Ba'athists. Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party would later consolidate their hold on power in a bloody 1968 coup.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein launched an eight-year war against Khomeini's Iran with weaponry and intelligence from the United States and others. Under contracts approved by the U.S. Commerce Department, American companies provided Saddam with materials necessary to produce chemical and biological weapons which he used on Iranian soldiers. The U.S. also funneled weapons and intelligence to Iran, via Israel, through a scheme now known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Nearly 1 million Iraqis and Iranians died in that senseless war.
Unprovoked, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 with President Ronald Reagan's tacit blessing and U.S. funding. The Lebanese capital, Beirut, was laid waste under a savage, two-month Israeli military siege. Using American-made cluster and phosphorous bombs in civilian areas, nearly 20,000 Lebanese civilians and Palestinian refugees were killed as a result of Israel's invasion.
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From installing and propping up monarchies to arming brutal dictators and military conquerors, the people of the Middle East have suffered greatly as a result of our meddling in the region. This being just a small sampling of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, we might begin to understand why people in the region think President Bush's focus on Saddam Hussein has less to with securing peace and more to do with securing oil.
Denver native Wadi Muhaisen is an expert in international and comparative law and professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Diplomacy?
- How the US. bribed other nations into supporting the war.
by John Pilger
If you want to know how George W Bush will go about getting international support for war, look at how his father did it 12 years ago...................

It was one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the United Nations, and is about to be repeated. For the first time, the full UN Security Council capitulated to an American-led war party and abandoned its legal responsibility to advance peaceful and diplomatic solutions. On 29 November, the United States got its war resolution. This was made possible by a campaign of bribery, blackmail and threats, of which a repetition is currently under way, especially in countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In 1990, Egypt was the most indebted country in Africa. Baker bribed President Mubarak with $14bn in "debt forgiveness" and all opposition to the attack on Iraq faded away. Syria's bribe was different; Washington gave President Hafez al-Assad the green light to wipe out all opposition to Syria's rule in Lebanon. To help him achieve this, a billion dollars' worth of arms was made available through a variety of back doors, mostly Gulf states.

Iran was bribed with an American promise to drop its opposition to a series of World Bank loans. The bank approved the first loan of $250m on the day before the ground attack on Iraq. Bribing the Soviet Union was especially urgent, as Moscow was close to pulling off a deal that would allow Saddam to extricate himself from Kuwait peacefully. However, with its wrecked economy, the Soviet Union was easy prey for a bribe. President Bush sent the Saudi foreign minister to Moscow to offer a billion-dollar bribe before the Russian winter set in. He succeeded. Once Gorbachev had agreed to the war resolution, another $3bn materialised from other Gulf states.

The votes of the non-permanent members of the Security Council were crucial. Zaire was offered undisclosed "debt forgiveness" and military equipment in return for silencing the Security Council when the attack was under way. Occupying the rotating presidency of the council, Zaire refused requests from Cuba, Yemen and India to convene an emergency meeting of the council, even though it had no authority to refuse them under the UN Charter.

The punishment of impoverished countries that opposed the attack was severe. Sudan, in the grip of a famine, was denied a shipment of food aid. None of this was reported at the time. By now, news organisations had one objective: to secure a place close to the US command in Saudi Arabia. At the same time, Amnesty International published a searing account of torture, detention and arbitrary arrest by the Saudi regime. Twenty thousand Yemenis were being deported every day and as many as 800 had been tortured and ill-treated.

Neither the BBC nor ITN reported a word about this. "It is common knowledge in television," wrote Peter Lennon in the Guardian, "that fear of not being granted visas was the only consideration in withholding coverage of that embarrassing story." When the attack was over, the full cost was summarised in a report published by the Medical Education Trust in London. More than 200,000 people were killed or had died during and in the months after the attack. This also was not news. Neither was a report that child mortality in Iraq had multiplied as the effects of the economic embargo intensified. Extrapolating from all the statistics of Iraq's suffering, the American researchers John Mueller and Karl Mueller have since concluded that the subsequent economic punishment of the Iraqis has "probably taken the lives of more people in Iraq than have been killed by all weapons of mass destruction in history".
http://www.stevethepro.ukf.net/thought/diplomacy.htm

Friendly Dictators
(written in 1995)
Many of the world's most repressive dictators have been friends of America. Tyrants, torturers, killers, and sundry dictators and corrupt puppet-presidents have beenaided, supported, and rewarded handsomely for their loyalty to US interests.
Abacha, General Sani-Nigeria/Amin, Idi-Uganda /Banzer, Colonel Hugo- Bolivia
Batista, Fulgenci-Cuba/Bolkiah, Sir Hassanal-Brunei/Botha, P.W.-South Africa
Branco, General Humberto-Brazil/Cedras, Raoul-Haiti/Cerezo, Vinicio-Guatemala
Chiang Kai-Shek-Taiwan//Cordova, Roberto Suazo-Honduras/Christiani, Alfredo-El Salvador/Diem, Ngo Dihn-Vietnam/Doe, General Samuel-Liberia/Duvalier, Francois-Haiti/Duvalier, Jean Claude-Haiti/Fahd bin'Abdul-'Aziz, King-Saudi Arabia/Franco, General Francisco-Spain/Hitler, Adolf-Germany/Hassan II-Morocco/Marcos, Ferdinand-Philippines/Martinez, General Maximiliano Hernandez-El Salvador/Mobutu Sese Seko-Zaire/Noriega, General Manuel-Panama/Ozal, Turgut-Turkey/Pahlevi, Shah Mohammed Reza-Iran/Papadopoulos, George-Greece/Park Chung Hee-South Korea/Pinochet, General Augusto-Chile/Pol Pot-Cambodia/Rabuka, General Sitiveni-Fiji/Montt, General Efrain Rios-Guatemala/Salassie, Halie-Ethiopia/Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira-Portugal/Somoza, Anastasio Jr.-Nicaragua/Somoza, Anastasio, Sr.-Nicaragua/Smith, Ian -Rhodesia
Stroessner, Alfredo-Paraguay/Suharto, General-Indonesia/Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas-Dominican Republic/Videla, General Jorge Rafael-Argentina/Zia Ul-Haq, Mohammed-Pakistan
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html