Reply #12: In July 1979, Iraq acquired a new leader, Saddam Hussein

[notadmblnd]

the following is an excerpt from the book "Sorrows of the Empire" by Chalmers Johnson pg 223

snip:In July 1979, Iraq also acquired a new leader, Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti of the Ba'ath Party. Slightly more than 20 years earlier, in 1958, Iraqi military officers inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist revolt in 1952 against the British backed monarchy in Egypt, had seized power and taken the country in a Soviet leaning direction. The leader of the coup, General Abdel-Karim Kassem, proclaimed a republic, withdrew from the anti Soviet Baghdad Pact, legalized the Communist Party, decreed wide ranging land reform, and even granted autonomy to the Kurds in the north. These shifts, coming at the height of the Cold War, were too much for the US-CIA director Allan Dulles publicly called Iraq "the most dangerous spot in the world"- and in 1963, the CIA supported the anti communist Ba'ath Party's efforts to bring Kassem's republic to an end. Ba'ath activists, including a youthful Saddam Hussein, gunned down Kassem and many others on a list the CIA supplied. The plotters were able, however, only to create a coalition government. In 1968, the CIA again fomented a palace revolt in which the Ba'athists eliminated their coalition partners and assumed direct control. According to Roger Morris, a staff member of the national Security Council during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, "It was a regime that was really primary". In July 1979, the same year as the anti American revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein replaced his mentor, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, as president, a position he held until 2003. He was like many other famous beneficiaries of American political intrigue before and since, a CIA "asset".