Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [25]
On top of this, the al Qaeda poison and explosives factory Bush and his team claimed Saddam was harboring was located in northern Iraq—an area controlled by Kurds and patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes since the early nineties. The north of Iraq was out of Saddam’s reach, but within our own. The base actually belonged to Ansar al Isalam, a militant fundamentalist group whose leader has branded Saddam Hussein an “enemy.” A tour of the base by a large group of international journalists quickly revealed that no weapons were being manufactured there.
But none of that mattered. The president had said it—it had to be true! Yes, this whopper worked so well that, in the months leading up to the war in Iraq, polls showed that up to half of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein had ties to Osama bin Laden’s network. Even before Bush had served up his 2003 State of the Union address, and Powell had presented the Saddam-Osama “evidence” to the U.N., a Knight-Ridder poll found that half of those questioned already incorrectly thought that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers held Iraqi citizenship. Bush didn’t even have to say it.
The Bush administration had succeeded in perpetrating one of the biggest lies of all time, confusing Saddam with Osama in the minds of the American public. Once you sell the people on the notion that Saddam had a hand in the mass murder of nearly 3,000 people on American soil, well, even if the bogus weapons of mass destruction whopper didn’t hold up, this would be enough to get the flags waving and the troops a-packin’.
Of course the problem with this whopper—other than it is a cynical, premeditated fabrication—is that Osama bin Laden considers Saddam to be an infidel. Hussein committed the sin of creating a secular Iraq instead of a Muslim state run by fanatical Muslim clerics. Under Saddam, Baghdad had churches, mosques and, yes, even a synagogue. Hussein had persecuted and killed thousands and thousands of Shiites in Iraq because of the threat they posed to his secular government.
In fact, the biggest reason Saddam and Osama don’t like each other is the same reason the Bushes stopped liking Saddam: the invasion of Kuwait. Bush & Co. was pissed because Saddam was threatening the security of our oil in the Gulf, and Osama was pissed because it brought American troops to Saudi Arabia and the Muslim holy lands. That’s bin Laden’s biggest problem with us—and it’s all because of Saddam!
Saddam and Osama were mortal enemies and they could not put their mutual hatred aside, even to join together to defeat the USA. Man, to not team up when it meant destroying the Great Satan Bush—THAT is a lot of hate!
#4 Whopper, Heavy on the Pickles and Onions: “Saddam Hussein is the world’s most evil man!”
Okay, he was bad. Really bad. He gassed the Kurds, gassed the Iranians, tortured the Shiites, tortured the Sunnis, tortured countless others, and during the sanctions against Iraq, let his people starve and suffer all types of deprivation while he hoarded money and kept his many palaces well-stocked with provisions (and a petting zoo for his nutcase adult sons).
This is all gruesome stuff, and the world was right to condemn him and to support any efforts by the people of Iraq to have him removed.
But the United States never gave a rat’s ass about how badly Saddam the Dictator treated his own people. We never care about that stuff. In fact, we like dictators! They help us get what we want and they do a great job of keeping their nations subservient to our galloping global corporate interests.
We have a long and proud history of propping up madmen and their regimes as long as it helps us rule the world. Obviously, there are our old pals