The U.S. government began "enabling" Saddam as early as 1959 when the CIA enlisted his help in undermining the government of Abdul Karim Qasim. The young Saddam was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad which botched the assassination of then Iraqi prime minister General Abdul-Karim Qasim.

The U.S. supported the coup that put Saddam in power in 1968, continued into the 1980s. The infamous Rumsfeld visit symbolized the U.S. policy of providing military and diplomatic assistance to the Iraqi regime in its catastrophic war with Iran. Cole points out that Secretary of State George Shultz even went so far as to shield Saddam from a possible UN condemnation for Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran.

The U.S. ambassador April Glaspie gave a "green light" to Saddam just before Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. She was "retired" by the State Department and has been conveniently silent ever since.

In 1989, on December 20, 1983 in Baghdad Saddam Hussein met with his friend Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld was sent by then president Ronald Reagan to help Saddam fight the Islamic revolution in Iran. This close cooperation led to Washington selling loads of military equipment and also chemical precursors, insecticides, aluminum tubes, missile components and anthrax Iraq. They were used to gas Iranian soldiers and then civilian Kurds in Halabja, northern Iraq, in 1988.

After the Halabja massacre, the Pentagon engaged in a massive disinformation campaign, spinning that the massacre was caused by Iran. US military aid enabled the US to invade Kuwait in 1990. Between 1991 and 1998, UN weapons inspectors conclusively established that the US - as well as British, German and French firms - had sold missile parts and chemical and bacteriological material to Iraq.

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Saddam Hussein was captured at the time when Halliburton was under extreme pressure for effectively swindling American taxpayers.