[Reader-list] Regime Change in Iraq, some years ago

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear all on the Reader List,

As the world prepares for war on Iraq, I thought that it might be 
interesting to note the last time the United States sought a regime 
change in Iraq. An interesting episode from the early life of Mr. Hussein, 
and his close links with the gentlemen of the Central Intelligence 
Agency - as chronciled by Roger Morris in the New York Times.

Pattern Recognition is an interesting game, and just as the Osama Bin 
Laden CIA link was an interesting pattern that morphed as time went by, 
here is another parrallel narrative.The pattern is the same.

I found this on the New York Times website on the op ed page for the 
14th of March, 2003

________________________________

A tyrant 40 years in the making
By Roger Morris, The New York Times, 14 March 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/14MORR.html

On the brink of war, both supporters and critics of US policy on Iraq 
agree on the origins, at least, of the haunted relations that have brought 
us to this pass: America's dealings with Saddam Hussein, justifiable or 
not, began some two decades ago with its shadowy, expedient support 
of his regime in the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s. Both sides are mistaken. 
Washington's policy traces an even longer, more shrouded and fateful 
history. Forty years ago, the CIA, under president John F Kennedy, 
conducted its own regime change in Baghdad, carried out in 
collaboration with Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi leader seen as a grave threat in 1963 was Abdel Karim 
Kassem, a general who five years earlier had deposed the 
Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. Washington's role in the coup went 
unreported at the time and has been little noted since. America's 
anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in 
disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of 
journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the CIA