Wasn’t Saddam a partial ally at one time?
Yes. There are pictures of him shaking hands with Rumsfeld and probably others. He may have been a blood thirsty dictator, but I guess he was *our* blood thirsty dictator at one time.
But I agree with pfflier. We should have made sure there was a viable replacement.
We (by “we” I mean the U.S. govt) supported Saddam when Saddam was fighting Iran. Later we twisty-tailed around and said tut-tut, what he did to the Iranians (poison gas) was a war crime.
No, that is a myth.
At one time, during the Iran-Iraq war we gave Iraq intel on the location of Iranian military sites at a time Iran was targeting US flagged oil tankers, and trying to launch speedboat attacks on our ships. It was a way to let two regimes we had no love for- Iran and Iraq- weaken each other with minimal effort on our part, certainly not an alliance with Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein then attacked an Iranian nuclear site, while Israel took out Iraq’s nuclear site. Also at that time we were more heavily dependent on Iraqi oil because Iran had not long before been taken over by the mullahs.
The US has backed the Kurds against Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party since Richard Nixon’s presidency.