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The Iraqi Revolution
But on July 14, 1958, Iraq was rocked by a powerful social explosion. A military rebellion turned into a countrywide revolution. The king and his administration were suddenly gone, the recipients of people's justice.
Washington and Wall Street were stunned. In the week that followed, the New York Times, the U.S. "newspaper of record," had virtually no stories in its first 10 pages other than those about the Iraqi Revolution.
While another great revolution that took place just six months later in Cuba is better remembered today, Washington regarded the Iraqi upheaval as far more threatening to its vital interests at the time.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it "the gravest crisis since the Korean War." The day after the Iraqi Revolution, 20,000 U.S. Marines began landing in Lebanon. The day after that, 6,600 British paratroopers were dropped into Jordan.
This was what came to be known as the "Eisenhower Doctrine." The United States would intervene directly--go to war--to prevent the spread of revolution in the vital Middle East.
U.S. and British expeditionary forces went in to save the neocolonial governments in Lebanon and Jordan. Had they not, the popular impulse from Iraq would have surely brought down the rotten dependent regimes in Beirut and Amman.
But Eisenhower, his generals and his arch-imperialist Secretary of State John Foster Dulles also had something else in mind: invading Iraq, overturning the revolution and installing a new puppet government in Baghdad.
Three factors forced Washington to abandon that plan in 1958: the sweeping character of the Iraqi Revolution; the announcement by the United Arab Republic, which bordered Iraq, that its forces would fight the imperialists if they sought to invade; and the emphatic support of the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union for the revolution. The USSR began a mobilization of troops in the southern Soviet republics close to Iraq.
The combination of these factors forced the U.S. leaders to accept the existence of the Iraqi Revolution. But Washington never really reconciled itself to the loss of Iraq.
Over the next three decades, the U.S. government applied many tactics designed to weaken and undermine Iraq as an independent country. At various times--such as after Iraq completed the nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Co. in 1972 and signed a defense treaty with the USSR--the United States gave massive military support to right-wing Kurdish elements fighting Baghdad and added Iraq to its list of "terrorist states."
The United States supported the more rightist elements within the post-revolution political structure against the communist and left-nationalist forces. For example, the United States applauded the suppression of the Iraqi Communist Party and left-led labor unions by the Ba'ath Party government of Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, the United States encouraged and helped to fund and arm Iraq in its war against Iran. U.S. domination of the latter was ended by Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. In reality, though, the U.S. aim in the Iran-Iraq war was to weaken and destroy both countries. Ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger revealed the real U.S. attitude about the war when he said, "I hope they kill each other."
The Pentagon provided Iraq's air force with satellite photos of Iranian targets. At the same time, as the Iran-Contra scandal revealed, the United States was sending anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.
The Iran-Iraq war was a disaster, killing a million people and weakening both countries.
Collapse of USSR and Gulf War
When the war finally ended in 1988, developments in the Soviet Union were posing a new and even graver danger to Iraq, which had a military and friendship treaty with the USSR. In pursuit of "permanent détente" with the United States, the Gorbachev leadership in Moscow began to cut its support for its allies in the developing world.
In 1989, Gorbachev went further and withdrew support for the socialist governments in Eastern Europe, most of which then collapsed. This sharp shift in the world relationship of forces--culminating with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself two years later--constituted the greatest victory for U.S. imperialism since World War II.
It also opened the door for the U.S. war against Iraq in 1991, and more than a decade of sanctions/blockade and bombing that have devastated Iraq and its people.
Today, the Bush administration is seeking to win public support for a new war against Iraq by talking about "weapons of mass destruction" and "human rights." The reality is that Washington is concerned about neither Iraq's diminished military capacity nor human rights anywhere in the world.
What moves U.S. policy toward Iraq in 2002 is the same objective that motivated Washington and Wall Street 80 years ago: oil.
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Källa: http://www.pcfla.org/history.htm
See also www.blompottan.se/oil.htm
KIRKUK 28 december 2005, Iraq — Kurdish leaders have inserted more than 10,000 of their militia members into Iraqi army divisions in northern Iraq to lay the groundwork to swarm south, seize the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and possibly half of Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and secure the borders of an independent Kurdistan.
Five days of interviews with Kurdish leaders and troops in the region suggest that U.S. plans to bring unity to Iraq before withdrawing American troops by training and equipping a national army aren't gaining traction. Instead, some troops that are formally under U.S. and Iraqi national command are preparing to protect territory and ethnic and religious interests in the event of Iraq's fragmentation, which many of them think is inevitable.
Källa: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11397.htm
Update: 2010 02 14 URL: http://ejnar.se/7192/mil.htm