By Richard Lee
1917 – World War I ends. Britain, along with France, re-draws map in Middle East, breaking up the Ottoman Empire previously ruled by Turkey by creating countries, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, among others, in preparation for oil plundering and exploitation.
1920 – Britain installs King Faisal I as King of greater Syria (today known as Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine), but France refuses to withdraw from these territories. Fighting between French troops and the troops of King Faisal I result in Faisal's loss of Syria. The British exile Faisal to Great Britain. The British Empire annexes Palestine, Jordan and the two southern provinces of Iraq--Baghdad and Basra. Britain & France continued to skirmish over who would get the Mosul province, (in northern Iraq), which had been discovered as being oil-rich, albeit undeveloped. The British create the country of Iraq, and also establish Jordan, (Transjordania), as another one of their colonies. Iraqis rise in revolt against Britain’s occupation but were crushed by the British Royal Air Force, which bombed, strafed, and used poison gas against Iraqis. The British had reneged on their promise to leave the Southern area of Iraq the to the Shi’ite natives after they seized the area.
1921 - Iraq continues to rebel against British occupation, but are unable to expel the British foreign invaders. The British agree to the eventual independence of Iraq, which would not actually come until 11 years later in 1932. The British break off a piece of Southern Iraq, create another country called Kuwait in order to effectively seal off Iraq from access to the Persian Gulf.
1925 - The British drop poison gas on the Kurdish town of Sulaimaniya in Iraq, the first time that gas was deployed from warplanes.
1932 – Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia, were states created by Imperialists Britain, the U.S., and France for the purpose of taking their oil, with or without the permission of the native Arab population. Native Arabs from all these countries have rebelled incessantly against the puppet governments installed by Britain, the U.S., and France.
1941 - Japan invades China, U.S. responds by cutting off Japan’s oil. Japan retaliates by bombing Pearl Harbor.
1950 - After graduating Yale in 1948, George Bush (father) moves to Texas to start up oil businesses, Dresser Industries (1948-1950); Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company (1951-1953); & Zapata Petroleum Corporation (1953-1966).
1951 - Mohammed Mossadigh takes power in Iran and declares that Iran will control its own oil. The U.S. is furious at Iran’s attempt at independence.
1953 - After 2 years of U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iran, the CIA supports plot to overthrow Iran’s Mossadigh and places the Shah of Iran, an American puppet ruler, in power. The Shah had been on the CIA payroll. American Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf Sr. helps Shah develop SAVAK secret police.
1956 - Saddam Hussein, born and raised dirt poor, joins the Iraqi Ba'ath Socialist Party at the age of 19.
1958 - Arab uprisings began in Lebanon and Jordan against British & French occupation. Iraqi Military General Karim Kassem stormed the Palace, and killed the British puppet government, including Prime Minister Nouri as-Said, King Faisal II, and the crown prince in a successful coup d’etat. Kassem then ordered British troops out of Iraq. At the age of 21, Saddam Hussein spends six months in prison for trying to dislodge Kassem from power shortly after the coup.
1959 - Kassem withdraws Iraq from the Baghdad Pact which Britain had coerced Iraq into in 1941. Kassem continues to keep the oil sales flowing to the western countries, and then threatens to invade Kuwait, but was defeated by British troops. After Saddam Hussein gets out of prison, he participates in the coup attempt against Kassem, as Hussein is among the assassins who wounds Kassem. But Hussein gets shot in his leg by return fire, and is forced into exile first in Syria, then to Egypt. Kassem survives Saddam’s coup attempt and maintains power. Saddam is then sentenced to death in absentia, at the age of 23.
1963 - Kassem is overthrown by a group of officers headed by Abdul Salam Arif, which also included Saddam Hussein, a Ba’ath party enforcer. Hussein returns to Iraq to play a significant role in the new government, with discreet help from the CIA and M.I.6, the British Foreign Intelligence agency. Saddam Hussein, along with George Bush (father) were both on the CIA payroll in 1963. Abdul Salam Arif becomes the new president, Hussein gets a leadership position, and Kassem is promptly machine-gunned on national TV.
1964 - Saddam Hussein is arrested in a “cleanup” against subversive Ba'ath Party members, and goes to prison again.
1966 - Abdul Salam Arif was assassinated by a bomb in his helicopter, terrorism probably sanctioned by the CIA. His brother Abdul Rahman Arif then assumes power. While still in prison, Saddam is elected Deputy Secretary General of the Ba’ath Party.
1967 - Saddam Hussein escapes from prison. The Six-Day War takes place, in which Israel took control of parts of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, which greatly strains relations between Iraq and the Western imperialists.
1968 - Saddam Hussein graduates from the College of Law in Egypt. In July, Arif is overthrown by a cabal of officers, including Saddam Hussein, from the underground Ba'ath Party, led by Gen. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who becomes the new president. Saddam gets position responsible for Internal Security. Iraq takes a more anti-western political orientation, and improves relations with the Soviet Union.
1970 - The Emir of Kuwait contracts with a Texas drilling company, Zapata Oil, George H.W. Bush’s (father) company to drill the oil fields near the Iraqi border.
1972 - Iraq nationalizes oil resources, which had still been under the control of Western oil companies. The U.S., Britain, and Israel respond by arming and funding both Iran and Iraq's Kurds in northern Iraq in hopes of overthrowing the Ba’ath Party regime.
1975 – Regarding all the Iraqis who were killed in these CIA-sponsored coups, Former Secretary of State and Israel-supporting American Henry Kissinger was quoted as saying, "Covert operations should not be confused with missionary work."
George W. Bush (son) receives MBA from Harvard Business School, and returns to Texas to start his own oil business.
1976 - George Bush (father) is appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency by President Gerald Ford.
1979 - Saddam Hussein ousts President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who is stripped of all positions and placed under house arrest, and became the only Iraqi head of state to leave office alive. Hussein then assumes the presidency. He uses Iraq's oil revenues to modernize and industrialize his nation, improving education and elevating the status of women. But Hussein ruled with an iron fist, crushing any opposition that would emerge within Iraq, knowing that political opposition was usually being covertly crafted by the CIA, so he would often summarily execute political dissenters on the spot.
In Iran, the Islamic revolution headed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrows the Shah, and expels him along with the U.S. & Britain from Iran’s oil-rich fields. Iran takes 66 Americans hostage at the American Embassy in Tehran. After the hostages were held for 444 days, the U.S. seeks revenge against Iran. George Bush, (father) vice-presidential running mate, was working behind the scenes to arrange for the hostages’ release immediately after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in January 1981.
1980 - Saddam terminates the border agreement of 1975 with Iran, then, with U.S. urging, invades Iran, provoking a war due to disputes over Southern Shiite territories occupied by Iran in 1973. While previously siding with Iran, Washington and London switch sides, now supporting Iraq by providing finances, arms, technicians, and materials in order to teach Iraq how to produce poison gases and conduct germ warfare. The U.S. & Britain try to overthrow Khomeini in Iran but fail to return the oil-rich nation to western control.
1984 – During brutal Iran/Iraq war, President Ronald Reagan authorizes intelligence sharing with Iraq. Shortly thereafter, U.S. begins to covertly share intelligence and sell weapons also to Iran via the Iran-Contra arms deals. Israel-supporting Henry Kissinger, who brutally killed millions by carpet bombing innocent civilians in Vietnam and Cambodia, in addition to killing thousands in Chile, began to engineer the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis as the United States double-crossed both countries by pledging to each their “support.” The U.S. supplied both sides with intelligence so they could destroy each other. The intelligence that the United States passed to the Iranians was a mixture of factual and bogus information. Humanitarian Kissinger was privately quoted as saying, “I hope they both kill each other,” referring to Iran and Iraq. In 1984 Reagan dispatched a Mid-East Special Envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, to meet with Saddam. Within weeks, the U.S. normalized relations with Saddam – despite his well-publicized use of lethal gas on Iranian soldiers and civilians. Hussein’s use of chemical weapons didn’t bother Rumsfeld much back then, because it was U.S.-sponsored. And you wonder why the Arabs hate Americans?
1985 - The U.S. Department of Commerce licensed 70 biological experts to Iraq between 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax, sent by the American Type Culture Collection, then situated in Rockville, MD, now situated at George Mason University in Virginia. Shipments continued after President Bush succeeded Reagan in 1989, after the Iran-Iraq war ended in 1988. In other words, Saddam Hussein was still able to purchase biological weapons from the U.S. for at least four more years until the U.S. administration’s concern about Iran would pass.
1988 - War with Iran ends with no change in borders. When Iraq's Kurds rebel, Hussein uses poison gas against them which the U.S. had assisted him in procuring.
1990 - Tariq Aziz, Foreign Minister of Iraq, said that the United States oil companies organized increases in oil production in Kuwait as they conspired to boycott Iraqi oil, causing a drop in billions of dollars of revenue in Iraq, which wreaked economic destruction on Iraq. Hussein considered this an act of war against Iraq. “By the end of June we started to realize that there is a deliberate conspiracy against Iraq,” Aziz said. “So we started thinking of how to react against the future aggressors on Iraq. It was our conviction, that the United States, after the weakening of the Soviet Union, when George Bush (father) decided that he wanted to dominate the whole world and take over the oil revenues in this region.” Iraq accused the American-Kuwaiti oil companies of sub-terranean slant drilling on the border, and hence extracting oil from the oil Iraqi side of the border. U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie of the Bush administration told Saddam Hussein that the U.S. would remain neutral if Iraq invades Kuwait. This was a trap that Bush set up for Saddam. On August 2 Iraq invades Kuwait, and then Bush turns around and complains to the U.N. about the invasion as Iraq comes up against strong international condemnation.
George W. Bush (son) sells two-thirds of his Harken Energy (formerly Bush Exploration Co.) stock at the top of the market for $850,000, a 200% profit, but the Security & Exchange Commission claims it received no report of the transaction until March of 1991. Bush later says the SEC misplaced the report. An SEC representative responds: "nobody ever found the 'lost' filing." One week after Bush's sale, Harken reports an earnings plunge. Harken stock falls more than 60%.
1991 – Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, who never served in the military, took fabricated fake satellite photographs to the Saudis and tells them that Iraqi troops have assembled on the border and are about to invade Saudi Arabia. Frightened and alarmed, while believing the photographs are genuine, the Saudis allow the U.S. to use Saudi Arabia’s air bases to launch attack against Saddam Hussein. that he shows Dick Cheney took fabricated “satellite photographs” to the Saudis to show them that supposedly the Iraqis were on the border about to invade Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis believed them, and that’s why they allowed the U.S. to launch the Gulf War against Iraq from their soil.George Bush I, along with a U.S./British/United Nations coalition, proceeds to obliterates Iraqi infrastructure with massive aerial bombing campaign & drives Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, causing mass suffering and death in Iraq.
1995 – CIA attempts coup to oust Saddam, but fails.
1996 - Economic sanctions augment mass suffering in Iraq, but Hussein begins to rebuild militarily and maintains power. From Iraq's perspective, eight years of debilitating sanctions, coupled with the indignation of being constantly subject to search under threat of violence by the United States and Great Britain was intolerable.
1998 – Hussein expelled all UN weapons inspectors. On December 17th, the United States and Britain began four days of intensive missile strikes and bombings. Many observers questioned the timing of the strikes, as they occurred on the eve of a scheduled impeachment vote against President Clinton. Many nations, including Russia, strongly condemned the air strikes.
1999 – In order to run with Bush, V-P candidate Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton, an oil-field services company based in Dallas, resigns in order to, in Cheney’s words, “to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest”. He helped himself to a $34 million severance package upon leaving.
2001 - Arabs retaliate against U.S. domination of their homelands by attacking the Pentagon and destroying the World Trade Center on 9/11. The U.S. gives Israel more than $3 billion per year in economic and military aid, so they can continue to buy weapons of mass destruction from American firms to wreak mass killings and destruction upon the Palestinians. CIA starts virulent drug trade in Afghanistan in order to finance the war in Afghanistan.
2002 - All five permanent members of the Security Council - the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China – all have international oil companies with major stakes in a change of leadership in Baghdad. The Iraqi regime-in-waiting, known as the “Iraqi National Congress” (an umbrella group financed by U.S. oil interests), has made it plain that it will not be bound by any deals that Hussein has in place. Many exiled Iraqis living in the U.S. would be guaranteed a governmental position in preparation for the next U.S.-installed regime. U.S. & Britain continue to control Northern third and Southern third of Iraq, prohibiting Iraq from flying in their own country. Iraq commonly fires upon U.S. & British planes, and in return the Western imperialists destroy missile sites, sometimes also killing civilians as collateral damage. Saddam Hussein signs contracts with Russian & French oil companies. The U.S. says they want to install a “democracy” in Iraq, but that’s just another lie. What they prefer is an American puppet dictator, as long as he is selling oil at prices that American oil companies dictate to him, and not “illegally” raising prices.
Bush wants to go to war under the pretext of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, which the U.S. largely supplied him with in the first place. If the U.S. was so opposed to these weapons, why did they supply him with massive amounts of them? When Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld was asked why President Bush is threatening military action against Iraq, he responded, “It has nothing to do with oil,” a bold-faced lie told straight to the faces of the American people on CBS 60 Minutes 12/5/02. Bush wanted to put Kissinger in charge of the war in Iraq, but Kissinger was forced not to accept the job because of his refusal to reveal his client list, which would in turn make public the truth about his sordid, mass-murdering past.
In congressional testimony last year, the CIA said there was a "low" possibility that Saddam would attack the United States with chemical or biological weapons. The Iraqi leader might take the "extreme step" of assisting terrorists if he were provoked by an American invasion, the agency predicted.

2003 - Bush, Israel, & Co. plan to place Iraq under U.S. military rule, and kill Saddam Hussein and Tarik Aziz. As Britain & the U.S. have done since 1920, they will use the “divide & conquer” principle to further divide Iraq up into three parts, Kurdish north, Sunnis center, & Shi’ite south. Iraq's oil will again be plundered by U.S. and British firms. Iraq will be set up as a client state to keep U.S. arms sales bustling. Turkey may get a slice of northern Iraq around the Kirkuk and Mosul oil fields. U.S. forces will squash any attempts by Kurds to set up an independent state. The swift, ruthless crushing of Iraq is intended to make Arab states, Palestinians, and Iran cower into submission to U.S./Israeli political dictates. In order to counterbalance the Israeli-American nuclear weapons monopoly in the Mideast, Russia begins to help Iran develop a nuclear plant reactor in Bushehr, Southern Iran, which should be operational by the end of the year.
U.S. Foreign Policy
Saddam Hussein poses no military threat whatsoever to the United States. He can’t even shoot a Scud missile accurately at nearby Israel, never mind attacking the United States 6,000 miles away. Saddam is like a former willing slave to the U.S. who is now rebelling against his master Bush. This war is all about oil & Israel. The Bush administration’s policy is largely directed by Ariel Sharon’s & Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli Likud Party. It is a double standard to allow Israel to have nuclear weapons, but vehemently prohibit any other Mideastern country from possessing them. Weapons manufacturers contribute millions of dollars to Republicans like the Bush campaign, and also to Democrats. In return for these legalized bribes (otherwise known as “campaign contributions”), Bush feels compelled quid pro quo to keep racking up arms sales so these corporations can enrich themselves “and create new jobs.” There must be a lot of en masse killings going on in order for these corporations to be profitable. American corporations that profit from the mass killings include Lockheed-Martin, Northrup-Grumman, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Texas Instruments, Rockwell, Raytheon, Hewlett Packard, UNISYS, Dupont, Eastman Kodak in addition to more than 100 others. U.S. military aid to Israel represents about 30% of all U.S. foreign aid, and in order for them to get a lot of “bang for their buck,” this money flows directly back to the U.S. government/military complex which includes these “defense contractors” which participate in unjustified military offenses more so than actual defense of the U.S.
War “Chicken” Hawk Vice President Dick Cheney, who never served in the military, had $43 million oil company income in the year 2000, from his company, Halliburton, which sells drilling equipment. Iraq has been one of Halliburton’s major customers, now Cheney apparently wants his equipment back. He is willing to send lower and middle class soldiers to die so he can continue his baneful, lustful greed for more oil profits. Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice sits on the Board of Directors of Chevron/Texaco.
Americans, by far the most gluttonous gas hogs in the world, can easily cut down drastically on their oil/gas consumption. Alternative fuel car companies have existed since the 1970s, but have been bought out and shut down by the monopolistic oil companies and car manufacturers. Toyota has now actually come out with a hybrid car that can run on electricity.
North Korea - According to Pentagon estimates, a war against North Korea will require 650,000 US troops and could cost 250,000 American casualties. For what? So the billionaire war hawk imperialists can brag to each other that they have full control of the world?! Bush will probably buy off North Korea with billions of dollars of “foreign aid” so Kim Jong-Il will refrain from firing his missiles at over 90,000 permanent U.S. troops (not counting the on-going U.S. troop buildup) occupying bases in South Korea and Japan. A war with South Korea would cause China, France, Iran & Russian to declare war on the U.S., thus provoking World War III, which would spark an unprecedented world-wide nuclear catastrophe.
Russia & France – Bush attempted to buy Russia’s vote at the Security Council for $8 billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer-funded aid. As of Jan. 31, 2003, Russia had not yet decided whether to accept it. The president will also have to bribe France to get their vote also to go to war against Iraq.
Websites for further study:
www.foreigncorrespondent.com www.indymedia.org www.onlinejournal.com
www.counterpunch.org www.freespeech.org www.votenowar.org
www.zmag.org www.freethemedia.org
The Internet and free speech cable channels are your only means to get the truth unadulterated, and unfiltered by the government/media complex. The U.S. government (FCC) issues the media broadcast licenses. If the media tells too much of the truth about the government’s actions overseas, their licenses will not be renewed.
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