He was never a nice guy. The US didn't "force" him to be a thug. As a thug, he was much more useful to the US than he would have been as a "nice guy". He was our thug. This is how we bought him...

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"Real power plays all sides of any conflict, alternately supporting and subverting (from within and without), playing one side against another, "managing the tension," until desired results are achieved.

A well-documented example is Afghanistan, where, in the wake of the Afghan-Soviet War, the US has installed and then violently overthrown successive regimes (Rabbani, Hekmatyr, Northern Alliance, Taliban), until a satisfying result was eventually achieved: a US puppet government, headed by former Unocal consultant and CIA asset Hamid Karzai, narco-trafficking warlord/bandits of the Northern Alliance, and helped along by US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, Pentagon-intelligence insider, former Unocal consultant, and assistant to current Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

In Iraq, the US and CIA have been playing a similar game for decades, running paramilitaries and armed groups with roots going back to Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and beyond. 'Americans have been left in the dark concerning CIA maneuvers in the Middle East, fed a steady diet of fantasy mush in which Arabs and Muslims are inexorably tagged as irrational, fanatical terrorists,' wrote Kurdish journalist Husayn Al-Kurdi. 'The actual history of CIA involvement in the region tells a far different story.'

The CIA's direct role in Iraq stretches back to the 1950s. Saddam Hussein himself was a US creation, a US ally and a CIA asset. As noted by Al-Kurdi, 'after propping up the corrupt regime of Nuri Said, the USA went after Abdul Karim-Kassem, whose popularly-supported coup eliminated the old British agent Nuri in 1958. Among those whom the CIA recruited to do its dirty work were the Iraqi Baath Party, including a brash power-hungry adventurer named Saddam Hussein.' The CIA then engineered the overthrow and assassination of Kassem in 1963, with Saddam playing a major role in the Kassem hit and subsequent liquidations of Communists.

Throughout the ensuring decades to the start of the Gulf War in 1990, Saddam was a key US ally in the region, as well as a US trading partner, and a business associate of George Herbert Walker Bush. (In another hemisphere, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega played a similar role over the same period.) The Bush administration's National Security Decision Directives (exposed in an LA Times investigation in 1992), as well as records detailing the Bush-Saddam relationships through the notorious BCCI and Banco Nacional del Lavoro (BNL) scandals, offer clear evidence that Saddam Hussein's government was explicitly and knowingly armed and financed by the US and personally involved with Bush.

After the Gulf War, in the guise of a "Kurd safe haven," the CIA created a protectorate and base for covert activities designed to destabilize the Iraqi regime, while allowing the suppression of Kurds and Muslims to continue simultaneously. Under George H.W. Bush, the CIA reportedly spent $20 million in anti-Saddam propaganda, and at least $11 million in aid to a number of Iraqi and Kurd opposition groups.

As Al-Kurdi points out: 'It was clear from the beginning that the "safe haven" was an operation to provide "cover" for CIA operations against Iraq and Turkish crackdowns on Kurds�not "comfort," as its official designation implied. A state of dependence was reinforced in which the "providers" could keep their Kurdish puppets on short strings.'

When Shi'ite Muslims in southern Iraq staged a revolt against Saddam in the spring of 1991 under the watchful eye of the CIA, the Bush I administration permitted Saddam's Iraqi troops to crush the revolt. To prevent a popular Islamic movement within Iraq (one that could threaten western oil interests and business interests), Bush did nothing as his former partner and vanquished foe crushed the revolt.

Keeping Saddam Hussein alive but neutered (via sanctions, no-fly zones, etc.) allowed the US to keep military forces in Saudi Arabia, while plans for an eventual Iraq regime change were debated. In the meantime, the rebuilding of Iraq, and various forms of covert trade, was lucrative to a number of western corporations (such as Halliburton, General Electric and others). The black market was also means of control. 'By turning a blind eye to smuggled oil,' writes former CIA operative Robert Baer in his book See No Evil, "the US managed to turn the Kurdish opposition against itself even as it helped Saddam pay for his praetorian guard, just what you'd expect of a clever superpower that was secretly supporting the local despot.'"