Saddam Hussein Gulf War Quotes

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.

the Afghans were well aware of what happened in Iraq during the Gulf War, when the Shiites and Kurds believed the leaflets the Americans dropped urging them to rise up against Saddam Hussein. They did, and the Americans did not come. Saddam’s forces had retaliated by massacring the insurgents. “The Afghans in the south fear the same fate—they need to be assured

When people in the West hear Iraq, they instantly think of Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War. But when I think about my home country, I remember the honey-drenched baklava my aunts gave me, the pinches on my cheeks, affectionate tickles under my chin, and coos of laughter

They did not overthrow the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran; support the genocide of eight hundred thousand leftists in Indonesia; intervene on behalf of the fascist Phalange against the Palestinians in Lebanon; fight a dirty war against Dhofarian insurgents; underwrite absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, the shah of Iran, Morocco, and the Gulf Emirates; build with billions of U.S. tax dollars the golden throne upon which Mubarak sits like a modern-day pharaoh; arm Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and turn a blind eye to his genocide against the communists and Kurds; then kill seventeen thousand Iraqi civilians in bombing raids during the Gulf War, including more than four hundred women and children incinerated in the Amariyah bomb shelter. Nor did they stir the Shias of southern Iraq into revolt, then abandon them to Saddam Hussein’s executioners because George Bush senior calculated that the total destruction of the regime would create an impermissible power vacuum that Iran might rush to fill.

In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance when, on the evening before the talks were scheduled to begin, Saddam Hussein announced that the independent state of Kuwait had, by virtue of a massive deployment of military force, become a part of Iraq. We were not to know that this act—and the name Saddam Hussein—would dominate international politics for the next decade and more, but it was still possible to witness something extraordinary: the sight of Mrs. Thatcher publicly inserting quantities of lead into George Bush’s pencil. The spattering quill of a Ralph Steadman would be necessary to do justice to such a macabre yet impressive scene.

Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re­gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion. Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer­tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi­dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap­ proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na­tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolades: you are characterized as courageous, you are outspoken and passionate, and on and on. The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point. · Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War's destructive results. We Arabs and Mus­lims are the sick ones, our problems are our own, totally self-inflicted. A number of things stand out about these kinds of performance. In the first place, there is no universalism here at all. Because you serve a god uncritically, all the devils are always on the other side: this was as true when you were a Trotskyist as it i's now when you are a recanting former Trotskyist. You do not think of politics in terms of interrelationships or of common histories such as, for instance, the long and complicated dynamic that has bound the Arabs and Muslims to the West and vice versa. Real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is, where cultures are at issue, highly problematic, since most cultures aren't watertight little packages, all homogenous, and all either good or evil. But if your eye is on your patron, you cannot think as an intellectual, but only as a disciple or acolyte. In the back of your mind there is the thought that you must please and not displease.

difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the major subject of this book. While the Bush administration—and especially Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and L. Paul Bremer III—bear much of the responsibility for the mishandling of the occupation in 2003 and early 2004, blame also must rest with the leadership of the U.S. military, who didn’t prepare the U.S. Army for the challenge it faced, and then wasted a year by using counterproductive tactics that were employed in unprofessional ignorance of the basic tenets of counter-insurgency warfare. The undefeated Saddam Hussein of 1991 The 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq can’t be viewed in isolation. The chain of events began more than a decade earlier with the botched close of the 1991 Gulf War and then it continued in the U.S. effort to contain Saddam Hussein in the years that followed.

War stripped of its passions. its phantasms. its finery. its veils. its violence. its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even. and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics. as though with a second skin. But these too are a kind of decoy that technology sets up before itself. Saddam Hussein's decoys still aim to deceive the enemy. whereas the American technological decoy only aims to deceive itself. The first days of the lightning attack. dominated by this technological mystification. will remain one of the finest bluffs. one of the finest collective mirages of contemporary History (along with Timisoara). We are all accomplices in these fantasmagoria. it must be said, as we are in any publicity campaign. In the past. the unemployed constituted the reserve army of Capital; today. in our enslavement to information. we constitute the reserve army of all planetary mystifications.

Between 1983 and 1988, Searle Pharmaceuticals CEO Donald Rumsfeld, acting as Ronald Reagan’s envoy in Iraq, arranged for the top-secret shipment of tons of chemical and biological armaments, including anthrax and bubonic plague, to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, hoping to reverse his looming defeat by Iran’s million-man army. Ayatollah Khomeini’s victorious Iranian forces were then routing Saddam in their war over the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration feared

Some of the more doctrine-laden ground people also talk about the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war, so they can think in bins or boxes: “strategic” means whatever the President thinks about and does, “operational” is what the CINC thinks about and does, “tactical” is component-level-and-below thinking and doing. To an airman this is meaningless. My tactical fighter (tactical), flying to Baghdad (operational), kills Saddam Hussein (strategic). So finally, in talking about air plans or air operations, I keep as far from these words as I can. Airpower is essentially very simple: Aircraft can range very quickly over very wide areas and accurately hit targets very close to home or very far away. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The capital P has no bearing on the PTSD of Israel. The dread of extinction is the white noise the people continuously try to ignore – continuously, because the dread of extinction is punctually refreshed. Following the Holocaust, within three years of the Holocaust, what starts to happen? Independence Day was proclaimed on May 15, 1948, and on May 16, 1948, five Arab armies launched what was avowedly a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation (its failure was the original Arab nakba – ‘catastrophe’). The same applied in June 1967 (the Six Day War) and in October 1973 (the Yom Kippur War)…In January 1991 the existential threat came from Saddam Hussein; during the first Gulf War, Tel Aviv was bombarded by Iraqi missiles, and Israeli families sat in sealed rooms with German-made gas masks covering their faces. In March 2002, with the Second Intifada, the threat came from the Palestinians. Now the threat comes from Gaza, and from the overarching prospect of nuclear weapons in Iran… To understate the obvious, this is not a formula for radiant mental health. And if there’s a scintilla of truth in the notion that countries are like people, then it is vain to expect Israel to behave normatively or even rationally. The question is not, How can you expect it, after all that? The question is, After all that, why do you expect it?

The stationing of American and European troops in Saudi-Arabia and the following military fight against the Iraqi army brought the Arab world into their closest contact with the ominous "West" since colonial times. The broad public in most Arab countries sided with Iraq, thus contrasting in the most obvious way with their governments’ positions. For the Islamists in all Arab states, especially those in Palestine, the Gulf-War was a great moment because it seemed to confirm their world view in an impressive manner; and those views were shared in an unprecedented way by the majority of the Arab population. In fact, the reaction of the population often pushed the Islamists to a more open position of support for Saddam Hussein than they had wished to take with regards to their main financiers, the Gulf-states and Saudi-Arabia. Nevertheless, the Western military intervention gave the Islamists the chance to become—for a short time—the leaders of the masses against their "corrupt" governments to an extent which they only had dreamt about until then.

Again and again, the Islamists stated that the Western intervention [in Iraq] was directed against the Muslim people and not against one political leader [Saddam Hussein] who did wrong. As a proof of this theory, they mentioned that the military and economic boycott, imposed by the "so-called security council", was sufficient to realise the two pretended aims of the US intervention: the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait and the destruction of the Iraqi military power. Ḥamās deplored the undifferentiated bombing of military and civilian targets that proved the "extent of the Western hatred of Islam and the Muslims" (madā ḅaqdihim ‘alā alIslām). This "ideological concept" (tas ṣawwur ‘aqā’ idī) was said to link the West and the Jews more than just economic and security interests. According to Ḥamās, one of the true goals of the Western invasion was the "establishment of the ‘Greater Israel’" as laid down in the texts of the Talmud. The invasion of Iraq should "facilitate Israel to conquer Jordan" (ghazw al-‘urdun).

Many have compared the Raytheon Patriot missile system – used extensively in the First Gulf War to counter Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles – to the Iron Dome. But while the two share the same mission, they have key differences. First, a single Patriot missile reportedly costs more than $2 million, and the Tamir missile costs about $75 thousand.

The ruling family in Kuwait is good at blackmail, exploitation, and destruction of their opponents. They had perpetuated a grave U.S. conspiracy against us . . . stabbing Iraq in the back with a poisoned dagger.” —Saddam Hussein

You Americans, you treat the Third World in the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it’s off to the fields.” —Saddam Hussein

The most often cited cautionary example is Iraq. Under the heavy-handed rule of Saddam Hussein, Christians faced some forms of discrimination but they were basically secure. Once Hussein fell, Christians became primary victims of the chaos that ensued. From a peak of 1.5 million Christians at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991, no more than 400,000 are left in the country, according to estimates, and the exodus shows no signs of abating. Many Christians in Egypt fear the same thing would happen if the Muslim Brotherhood ever returned to power, and Christians in Syria are convinced the same outcome would follow from a rebel victory. To return to Pope Francis, all this illustrates two points about his peace-making efforts going forward.

Secondly, given Iraq’s position as the largest and most powerful Arab state in the Gulf, it was viewed by the revolutionary regime as the main obstacle to Iran’s quest for regional hegemony. In the words of the influential member of the Iranian leadership, Hujjat al-Islam Sadeq Khalkhali: ‘We have taken the path of true Islam and our aim in defeating Saddam Hussein lies in the fact that we consider him the main obstacle to the advance of Islam in the region.

Kama George Bush angekuwa na amani ndani ya moyo wake na Saddam Hussein angekuwa na amani ndani ya moyo wake Vita ya Ghuba isingetokea. Vilevile, katika kitabu cha ‘Kolonia Santita’, kama Rais wa Tume ya Dunia angekuwa na amani ndani ya moyo wake na kiongozi wa Kolonia Santita angekuwa na amani ndani ya moyo wake Kolonia Santita isingepigana na Umoja wa Mataifa. Taifa lisingepigana na taifa, na mataifa yasingepigana na magaidi.

Saddam Hussein preemptively launched this war, with great encouragement from the United States and the rest of the West, to try to overturn the Islamic government which had just come to power and to annex land from Iran given up in the 1975 Algiers Agreement. The war, known then as the Gulf War until the United States appropriated that name for its 1991 invasion of Iraq,20 lasted from 1980 to 1988, with the United States at times, and quite cynically, supporting both sides of the armed conflict.