>>Oh - and to call him "president" is to demean the office of any properly-elected leader with the same title.
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>Are you saying that the US officials who used that title for him throughout the eighties were demeaning the title of their own president?

Yes. I'll stand by what I said.

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>>You might want to check out Hussein's background: http://www.emergency.com/hussein1.htm.
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>Nice site... completely unbiased. The article conveniently omits the role of the US in the Iran/Iraq war. Also missing the picture of D. Rumsfeld with pres. Hussein, see at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein.
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>How do you explain this, then:
>In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument.
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>According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements."
>(http://www.upi.com/inc/view.php?StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r, and don't say UPI is a liberal source which can't be trusted).
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>Also, check http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/09/1445208 - may shed more light.
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>So, you see, there's more to the background than you think.

And what's your point? That we should NOT have gone after Hussein because Rumsfeld use to call him a "friend"? That we should ignore the threat he became, or at least would have us believe he was? That we should have let him have Kuwait because previous policymakers gave him a leg up?

Sorry, doesn't wash. Hussein was a thug, pure and simple, and I'm sorry we played footsie with him at all. But our beef at the time was with Iran, not Iraq. When he decided to invade Kuwait, it was time to destroy the monster we helped create. If we had had the cajones to do it then, a whole lot more Iraqis would be alive today. As it was, we gave him a chance to straighten up, and he became even more of a monster.