WHY DOES WASHINGTON HATE SADDAM?


Editorial By Loise Neville

For 300 years, England followed a policy throughout
the British Empire of controlling small countries by
keeping them weak lest they become strong enough to
establish independence. A helpless nation is a
subservient nation that will readily come to terms and
sell its labor and its products at a low price to its
powerful technological neighbors. The technique of
containment is so successful that our own State
Department adopts it to control small agricultural or
oil furnishing nations for the benefit of corporations
that need cheap products to feed our industries.

Part of the recent U.S. policy of containment is to
demonize Saddam Hussein, telling us that he is a
vicious dictator who abuses his people. Yet everything
in the U.S. Army's own 1990 publication IRAQ: A
COUNTRY STUDY directly contradicts that view.

IRAQ:A COUNTRY Study (Area Handbook Series), Helen
Chapin Metz, ed., published by U.S. Army Chief of
Staff, is a textbook used for Georgetown University
where our foreign service personnel are trained. State
Department personnel and others who will be sent to
Iraq by our government need accurate information about
the country they will work in. Strangely enough, this
book tells them that Saddam Hussein created an ideal
country that liberated women and offered them high
level government and industry jobs; provided social
services to his people that no other Middle Eastern
country -- and, in fact, few world countries -- have
ever offered citizens; established universal free
schooling up to the highest education levels;
supported families of soldiers killed in war; granted
free hospitalization to everyone; and gave subsidies
to farmers.

In addition, the textbook says Saddam Hussein brought
electricity to everyone in Iraq, including those in
far outlying areas, built roads, established
agriculture on a large scale, promoted mining and
other industries to remove total reliance on oil,
provided both Arab and Western style banking systems
to give the people a choice between these
interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing accounts,
created a fair, western style legal system, and
abolished the old Mosaic law courts except for
personal injury, small court claims. In sum, according
to the U.S. Army textbook, Saddam Hussein made his
people the most prosperous in the Middle East across
all levels of society.

Washington tells us that Saddam Hussein is a threat to
the other Middle Eastern nations.

IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY states that Iraq's atomic plant
was used to furnish electricity, not only to its own
country but to five other Middle Eastern oil nations,
and Hussein was building a pipeline across the desert
to bring water to arid Saudi Arabia to enable them to
establish agriculture for their people and supplement
the expensive saline plants they used to convert gulf
water to usable, salt-free water.

WASHINGTON TELLS us that Iraq has always been hostile
to Kuwait because Kuwait was created by the British
from land that was originally part of Iraq and Saddam
needed the seaport Kuwait occupied.

IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY tells us that Kuwait had already
offered its seaport to Iraq, and it was using Iraq's
fleet of oil tankers to transport its own oil abroad,
as were many other oil countries. This gave them an
indigenous industry, independent of outside European
and American tankers which demanded higher fees. Thus
Kuwait and Iraq were in the oil tanker business
together, Iraq furnishing the tankers, Kuwait
furnishing the port.

Washington tells us that Saddam Hussein, without
consulting any other nation, cruelly invaded Kuwait
because Kuwait was illegally slant-drilling across the
border, removing Iraq's underground oil.

IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY tells us that the war with Iran,
a heavily militarized powerful client state of the
U.S. under the dictatorship of the Shah, left Iraq
bankrupt. Faced with rebuilding its infrastructure
destroyed in the war, Iraq needed money. No country
would loan it money except the U.S. Borrowing money
from the U.S. made Iraq its client state. A client
State could take no action without the permission of
the more powerful nation.

In 1990 Saddam Hussein complained to our State
Department about Kuwait's illegal removal of Iraqi
underground oil by slant drilling across the border
into Iraq. This had continued for years, but now Iraq
needed the money that this oil would supply to pay its
bills. Saddam considered a war with Kuwait but needed
Washington's permission. April Glaspie, our Ambassador
to Iraq, implied such permission by telling Saddam
that we were not concerned about disputes between
Middle Eastern nations and would not interfere.
Believing this to be the green light he wanted,
Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait. We all know what
happened next. U.S. and Britain, major members of the
UN Security Council of five, stirred a reluctant
Security Council into declaring war on Iraq, which
President George Bush declared was "for the New World
Order."

What was that war really about? IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY
states that Iraq was the leading country in forming an
Arab Alliance similar to the European Economic
Commission, an alliance of European countries. All oil
nations would share and work together and plan their
own army that would include no Europeans.

This is when alarm bells went off. The oil that makes
our plastics and runs our machines is in the hands of
European and American nations through leases.
Independent oil states working in concert could make
their own terms and control OPEC. The last thing the
Western world wants is an alliance of oil states --
especially if they have their own army. Their control
of oil would result in a huge financial crunch to big
business.

But there was something even worse about Saddam's
Iraq. IRAQ: A COUNTRY STUDY exposes Iraq as a
socialist state. Socialism seriously competes with
capitalism by nationalizing industry and selling its
products cheaply. The "New World Order" is a
capitalist economic order run by capitalist methods,
capitalist finance and carried out by capitalist
corporations. In such a world there is no place for
socialism.

That is what George Bush meant when he said that the
war with Iraq was "for the New World Order." That is
why a U.S. sting operation fooled Hussein into
attacking Kuwait. That is why George Bush said he
would "bomb Iraq into the stone age." That is why
Washington hates Saddam Hussein. That is why other
Arab nations could be convinced to join the war
against Iraq in 1990. None of them wanted their people
to demand the modernization and privileges Iraq gave
to its people.

But Saddam Hussein may have committed yet another
unforgivable "crime." At the time, it was reported
that he refused to sign the GATT treaty, and at the
last minute just before the military attacks on Iraq
began, Hussein was told by a member of our State
Department that if he signed the GATT there would be
no war. He refused to sign.

Why did Saddam Hussein refuse to sign the GATT treaty
that almost every other nation in the world had
signed? Because the GATT (General Agreement of Trade
And Tariffs) would automatically remove all social
programs in Iraq, remove sovereignty from the nation,
demand 50% of all products from the earth for the use
of international corporations on whatever terms they
chose, dictate what products Iraq could buy or sell,
dictate the wages of workers, demand that all seeds
planted by farmers be bought from international
corporations, claim corporate ownership of indigenous
plants and trees, and replace the laws of Iraq with
laws and regulations made by the World Trade
Organization, a central authority that in private
meetings sets irrevocable rules for all things that
relate to business or finance.

GATT is complex, but in essence amounts to putting all
political and financial power into corporate hands. It
endangers, even destroys, the ability of national
leaders or the populace of a nation to control its own
destiny.

The fact that Washington still demonizes Saddam
Hussein and wants his removal suggests to me that
Hussein still refuses to sign the GATT. What other
reason could there be for such unaccountable cruelty?

The long cruel blockade has killed many in Iraq since
the military war. It is reported to have caused the
deaths by starvation and disease of a million people
and is said to account for the deaths of 500 children
a week.