(no subject)
hey guys guess what? nobody cared in the least in the eighties when saddam gassed kurds in the north, trampled over the rights of his own people, killed dissidents, tortured anyone who looked suspicious in elaborate means, and enriched his followers while worsening the lot of his people. you know why nobody cared back then? because we supported iraq in their eight year war against iran, the biggest enemy of the eighties. and we can easily control dictators, not traditional democracies. that would require the people of a country to actually support us in our exploitation of them. we kept things friendly with saddam, until he disobeyed us wishes and invaded kuwait. which was coincidentally around the time of the fall of the soviet union, aka the communist menace we had previously used to attribute all foreign actions against. without that, what new enemy would we have? we had to get one fast, people. and saddam acted like a pawn in our game, and we squashed him. all of a sudden he became the beast of baghdad, the most evil tyrant alive, etc etc. there's other parallels. take general suharto of indonesia for instance, a man referred to for over 35 years in government circles as "our kind of guy." yeah, and also the same kind of guy who came to power by us means, funded with us money, armed with us guns, who killed hundreds of thousands of his own people. not to mention the repeated invasions of east timor, in which the entirety of the population was either displaced or killed (one third of east timorese population murdered in the nineties). he slipped out of power, and, consequently, us favor, in the late nineties. because he could no longer control his own people. so he's "our kind of guy," right? oh, and add to that the war on drugs, the extremely corrupt and murderous columbian government, the sanctions on cuba which are still the harshest in the world, and what do you have? us foreign policy forumla for success.
haha.
haha.