Was America Complicit in Some of Saddam's Crimes?

This column on the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lionel-beehner/was-america-complicit-in-_b_59494.html) and the books it references raise serious questions about the manner in which Saddam Hussein was tried and quickly executed. Did he deserve the death penalty - in my opinion, clearly yes. However, during much of the 1980's Saddam's biggest supporters were in Washington, D. C., when he was courted and assisted as a counterbalance to Iran after the fall of the Shah (whose supposed misdeeds paled compared to Saddam's or those of the mullahs how now run Iran). Here are a few highlights:

The trial of Saddam Hussein ended in disarray and disaster. Who can forget the grainy footage of hooded henchmen taunting the former dictator as he approached the gallows? The most cataclysmic moment in many Iraqis' lives was reduced to a thirty-second clip on YouTube. But while the ending to that sorry chapter in Iraqi history will be long remembered, its beginnings have been too often overlooked.

The answer, suggests Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group and author of the new book, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halbja. There were fears in Washington that politically damaging information might be unearthed about America's role propping up Saddam during the 1980s. "Once Saddam's regime was overthrown," he recently told Ken Silverstein of Harper's Magazine, "the Bush Administration made sure that instead of an international (or even a mixed Iraqi/international) tribunal, a purely Iraqi tribunal was established under strict U.S. control, with statutes written, essentially, in Washington." The perceived miscarriage of justice had a disastrous effect on Iraq, not to mention the larger global effort to try dictators and other war criminals. "The tribunal's evident partiality," Hiltermann continued, "along with other serious procedural problems, undermined its credibility and thereby also undermined the cause of justice and stability in postwar Iraq."

So what was Washington trying to hide? Donald Rumsfeld, as special envoy to President Reagan, visited Baghdad twice, in 1983 and in 1984, and met with Saddam Hussein ostensibly to reaffirm American support for Iraq against the Iranians during their eight-year war. According to a March 2005 article by Ari Berman in The Nation, Washington supplied Baghdad with landmines while "American companies, with the government's approval, sold the chemical agents used against Iranian troops and Iraq's own Kurdish population." Or as Hiltermann puts it, "Rumsfeld reassured the Iraqi leadership that it had broad latitude in prosecuting the war against Iran, including by using poison gas. Along with the Reagan administration, he thereby helped build up a state that terrorized its own citizens and turned a tinpot dictator into a tyrant threatening the region."

Do not forget who else was in the Reagan administration - the Chimperator's daddy. Might he have had something to hide as well?