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How the CIA put the
Baath in power
PSD To HTML conversion is important to webmasters because they cannot use the PSD file as it is for their web pages. if you need PSD To HTML conversion service save yourself some time, effort and money and send it in to the professionals. In early 1963, Saddam
had more important things to worry about than his outstanding bill at
the Andiana Cafe.On February 8, a mil- itary coup in Baghdad, in which
the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the
conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only
nine tanks under their con- trol. The Baath Party had just 850 active
members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What
tipped the bal- ance against him was the involvement of the United
States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961,
he threat- ened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq
Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited
Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. "We
really had the ts crossed on what was happening," James Critchfield,
then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. "We regarded it
as a great victory." Iraqi participants later confirmed American
involvement. "We came to power on a CIA train," admitted Ali
Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party sec- retary general who was about to
institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly
included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station
inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio
station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East
on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To
the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After
his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the
coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the
newspapers.
The above comes from
"Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein", by
Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, published by Verso, 2000.
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