Web of deceit; the history of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.

9781590512388

Web of deceit; the history of Western complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.

Lando, Barry M.

Other Press LLC 

2007

350 pages

$24.95

Hardcover

DS70

The December 30, 2006 hanging of Saddam Hussein apparently dashed any hopes that a fair and transparent judicial process for the Iraqi dictator would also bring to light the complicity of Western leaders for his many crimes. Fortunately for the historical record, Lando (a investigative producer with 60 Minutes for 25 years) has gone back to the period of the British Mandate of Iraq and exposed the hypocrisy of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and other Western leaders as they wring their hands and cry crocodile tears over Saddam's many victims. He describes Winston Churchill's bombing of Iraqis (in order to instill in them a "lively terror") as a precedent for Saddam's terror, CIA sponsorship of the young Saddam as he rose through the ranks of the Ba`ath Party (which the CIA also used to massacre putative Iraqi Communists on CIA-supplied lists), Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's cynical encouragement of Kurdish rebellion against the central government and see-no-evil attitude towards Saddam Hussein as he brutally crushed the uprising in 1975 after it no longer served US goals, and George H.W. Bush's similar actions in the wake of the first Gulf War. He also describes how the US and other Western powers looked the other way as Saddam "gassed his own people" at Halabja because they were encouraging his war against Iran during the 1980s, and even how the chemical weapons used to carry out those attacks were supplied by French, Belgian, and German firms. He takes the narrative "full circle" from the British Mandate to the US occupation.

([c]20072005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)