An interesting claim - update

At the time I posted this article about the woman who says the U.S. prevented her father and others from overthrowing Saddam in 1993, I said I didn't have any other verification of the claim.

Today, I have this Noam Chomsky interview for you (which you should really read in its entirety, as there's lots more information offered on our spreading of democracy around the globe), where he comments:

Up until the day of the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein was a fine guy. It wasn't secret. The U.S. and Britain were providing him with aid, they explained the reasons, it wasn't a secret. This was well after his worst atrocities, the Halabjah gassing and so on. It was long after the war with Iran and had nothing to do with Iran. The reasons were officially explained: We were providing Saddam with aid including technology for development of weapons of mass destruction out of responsibility to U.S. exporters, and supporting Saddam will improve the condition of human rights and stability in the region.

And that went on virtually up until the invasion of Kuwait, and then he became a bad guy all of a sudden, once he disobeyed orders. Then after the invasion, the U.S. is in total control and there is an uprising led by rebelling Iraqi generals, who didn't ask the U.S. for help. They asked for access to captured Iraqi equipment and wanted the U.S. to prevent helicopters and so on from destroying them. The U.S. just backed off and effectively authorized Saddam to destroy the rebellion.

The rebellion may have overthrown him, in which case Iraq would have been run by Iraqis and that's not tolerable. It's to be run by either a client or by us. And there were explanations which were public but people are very careful not to report them. Take for example, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times. He now explains in his columns that he was in favor of this invasion because it was a moral obligation, and what drew him to it was discovering the mass graves from the repression after the uprising. He is careful not to tell and others are polite enough not to report what he said at the time when he knew all about the mass graves. The atrocities were perfectly clear to everyone. The rebellion was crushed with U.S. authorization for reasons which he said were good reasons... 'The best of all worlds for the United States would be an iron-fisted military junta ruling Iraq the same way Saddam did' [NYT, July 7, 1991] and much to satisfaction of the U.S. allies in the region, and of course, the bosses in Washington. But we couldn't find another iron-fisted military junta so we had to settle for this one.

The New York Times Middle East correspondent explained at the time that as much as it pains us to see all killings and the bloodshed, there is nevertheless an overwhelming consensus that Saddam offers more hope for the stability in the region than those who are trying to overthrow him. Stability is a code word that means obedience.