Well, I happen to disagree.
Imo we're back at doing what we do best: support dictators like Musharraf, sending out the totally wrong signals to the rest of the world, and then suffering the consequences, just like what we did with Saddam Hussein.
EXCERPTS from the following:
Read what Sen. Robert Byrd, D-WV, put in the Congressional Record concerning the United States government's export of biological weapons ingredients to Iraq more than a decade ago. When asked by Byrd about this history as recounted in a recent Newsweek article, the current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who met with Saddam Hussein as an envoy for prior administrations, declined to directly answer Byrd's questions:
Congressional Record: September 20, 2002 (Senate)
Page S8987-S8998
HOW SADDAM HAPPENED
Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, yesterday, at a hearing of the Senate Armed
Services Committee, I asked a question of the Secretary of Defense. I
referred to a Newsweek article that will appear in the September 23,
2002, edition. That article reads as follows. It is not overly lengthy.
I shall read it. Beginning on page 35 of Newsweek, here is what the
article says:
America helped make a monster. What to do with him--and
what happens after he is gone--has haunted us for a quarter
century.
The article is written by Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas. It
reads as follows:
The last time Donald Rumsfeld saw Saddam Hussein, he gave
him a cordial handshake. The date was almost 20 years ago,
Dec. 20, 1983; an official Iraqi television crew recorded the
historic moment.
Like most foreign-policy insiders, Rumsfeld was aware that
Saddam was a murderous thug who supported terrorists and was
trying to build a nuclear weapon. (The Israelis had already
bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak.) But at the time,
America's big worry was Iran, not Iraq. The Reagan
administration feared that the Iranian revolutionaries who
had overthrown the shah (and taken hostage American diplomats
for 444 days in 1979-81) would overrun the Middle East and
its vital oilfields. On the--theory that the enemy of my
enemy is my friend, the Reaganites were seeking to support
Iraq in a long and bloody war against Iran. The meeting
between Rumsfeld and Saddam was consequential: for the next
five years, until Iran finally capitulated, the United States
backed Saddam's armies with military intelligence, economic
aid and covert supplies of munitions.
The history of America's relations with Saddam is one of
the sorrier tales in American foreign policy. Time and again,
America turned a blind eye to Saddam's predations, saw him as
the lesser evil or flinched at the chance to unseat him.
Even so, there are
moments in this clumsy dance with the Devil that make one
cringe. It is hard to believe that, during most of the 1980s,
America knowingly permitted the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission
to import bacterial cultures that might be used to build
biological weapons.
According to confidential Commerce
Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the
shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam's
Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political
opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials;
television cameras for "video surveillance applications";
chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy
Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments
of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" to the IAEC. According to
former officials, the bacterial cultures could be used to
make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State
Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine
injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons,
but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some
American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison
gas on the Kurds.
The United States almost certainly knew from its own
satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons
against Iranian troops. When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and
civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun
and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before
acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats,
that the culprits were Saddam's own forces. There was only
token official protest at the time.
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html
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And, as ever, we must not forget:
The threat from Iraq is exaggerated. Other despotic countries have or are seeking weapons of mass destruction (Syria, Libya, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia), have invaded their neighbors (Syria, Libya, and North Korea), and even used chemical weapons (Libya in Chad during the 1980s). Moreover, Iraq's military has been devastated by the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions. Americans should ask why the United States -- half a world away -- is more concerned about the Iraqi threat than are Iraq's neighbors.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/08-19-02.html
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The suspicion will not die that the Bush administration turned to Iraq for relief from a sharp decline in its domestic political prospects. The news had been dominated for months by corporate scandals and the fall of the stock market, and the November elections were shaping up as a referendum on the Republican's handling of domestic social and economic issues. Bush is reversing a half-century of strategic doctrine on the grounds that the new enemies America faces are not like the risk-averse Soviet Union.
But at the time George Kennan and others formulated the theory of deterrence, the Soviet ruler had long been Joseph Stalin, not known for being risk-averse. There is no evidence that any of the countries in Bush's axis of evil -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea -- are not deterrable according to the same logic that worked with the Soviets.
In making war against Iraq, Bush is risking not just American lives but America's good name. His high-handed attitude toward our allies has already earned the United States unnecessary ill will.
Unlike the Gulf War, however, the United States is going into this conflict with little international legitimacy or support.
http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/19/editors.html
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The way many see it, a U.S. war on Iraq could well pull Israel into the conflict, and as a result, unwillingly force other Arab countries into the battle. This, many fear, would provide fuel to the Islamist fundamentalists' anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Western stance, and place Arab regimes currently friendly toward the United States in a very precarious situation.
"This is exactly what someone like bin Laden wants," said one veteran diplomat. "In the eyes of many people in the region, this would give a certain degree of legitimacy to the likes of (Osama) bin Laden and his al Qaida terrorist organization," said the diplomat. "This is not something we want to see occur."
http://www.emedicine.com/cgi-bin/fo...19-09434300-BC-IRAQ-PANDORA-ANALYSIS-TEXT.TXT
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Said one former American ambassador to the Middle East: "Saddam does not pose a real threat to the U.S. Even if he did posses weapons of mass destruction, he does not have the delivery capability to target American cities."
http://www.emedicine.com/cgi-bin/fo...19-09434300-BC-IRAQ-PANDORA-ANALYSIS-TEXT.TXT
