NP friendly chit-chat & an interesting article re Iraq

[pynchonoid]

M:
>Still working on that novel?

That's an interesting question, happy to answer. Since
subscribing to Pynchon-L, I've finished two, my agent
is shopping them around, and I'm currently working on
another. It's great being able to earn a living as a
freelancer and control my own schedule so I can make
time for creative writing.

How's your novel coming along? Still writing about
that Jungian concert promoter and his mid-life crisis?

-Doug

P.S.  On an unrelated, topical tip, looks as if the US
has come full circle:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/14MORR.html>

March 14, 2003

A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making
By ROGER MORRIS

SEATTLE — On the brink of war, both supporters and
critics of United States 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 1980's.

Both sides are mistaken. Washington's policy traces an
even longer, more shrouded and fateful history. Forty
years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency, 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 C.I.A.

>From 1958 to 1960, despite Kassem's harsh repression,
the Eisenhower administration abided him as a counter
to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel
Nasser of Egypt — much as Ronald Reagan and George H.
W. Bush would aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980's against
the common foe of Iran. By 1961, the Kassem regime had
grown more assertive. Seeking new arms rivaling
Israel's arsenal, threatening Western oil interests,
resuming his country's old quarrel with Kuwait,
talking openly of challenging the dominance of America
in the Middle East — all steps Saddam Hussein was to
repeat in some form — Kassem was regarded by
Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.

In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American
intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies
— chiefly France and Germany — resisted. But without
significant opposition within the government, Kennedy,
like President Bush today, pressed on. In Cairo,
Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents
marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington
set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting
Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels.
The United States armed Kurdish insurgents. The
C.I.A.'s "Health Alteration Committee," as it was
tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned
handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift
either failed to work or never reached its victim.

Then, on Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup
in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but
eventually Kassem gave up, and after a swift trial was
shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television.
Washington immediately befriended the successor
regime. "Almost certainly a gain for our side," Robert
Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to
Kennedy the day of the takeover.

As its instrument the C.I.A. had chosen the
authoritarian and anti-Communist Baath Party, in 1963
still a relatively small political faction influential
in the Iraqi Army. According to the former Baathist
leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with
the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a
25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in
a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958.

According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi
refugees and a British human rights organization, the
1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath. Using lists
of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by
the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered
untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite — killings in
which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have
participated. No one knows the exact toll, but
accounts agree that the victims included hundreds of
doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other
professionals as well as military and political
figures.

The United States also sent arms to the new regime,
weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents
the United States had backed against Kassem and then
abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil,
Bechtel and British Petroleum were doing business with
Baghdad — for American firms, their first major
involvement in Iraq.

But it wasn't long before there was infighting among
Iraq's new rulers. In 1968, after yet another coup,
the Baathist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr seized
control, bringing to the threshold of power his
kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more
factional violence, came with C.I.A. backing. Serving
on the staff of the National Security Council under
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I
often heard C.I.A. officers — including Archibald
Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a
ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa
at the time — speak openly about their close relations
with the Iraqi Baathists.

This history is known to many in the Middle East and
Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it,
much less understand it. Yet these interventions help
explain why United States policy is viewed with some
cynicism abroad. George W. Bush is not the first
American president to seek regime change in Iraq. Mr.
Bush and his advisers are following a familiar
pattern.

The Kassem episode raises questions about the war at
hand. In the last half century, regime change in Iraq
has been accompanied by bloody reprisals. How fierce,
then, may be the resistance of hundreds of officers,
scientists and others identified with Saddam Hussein's
long rule? Why should they believe America and its
latest Iraqi clients will act more wisely, or less
vengefully, now than in the past?

If a new war in Iraq seems fraught with danger and
uncertainty, just wait for the peace.

Roger Morris, author of "Richard Milhous Nixon: The
Rise of an American Politician," is completing a book
about United States covert policy in Central and South
Asia.





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