The CIA has forged an alliance with Ba’athist exiles from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for intelligence in Yemen, according to the London Daily Telegraph for January 6. In an article entitled “US forges alliance with Saddam Hussein officers to fight al-Qaeda,” the Telegraph for January 6 also noted that this already-existing alliance with former enemies is on the upswing: “Co-operation with the former Baathist officers, who fled Iraq in the wake of the US-led invasion and the fall of Saddam, is expected to grow further in the wake of the failed terror attack in the skies above Detroit.”
Referring to Yemen’s National Security Agency, the Telegraph reported: "It has taken credit for providing intelligence that led to air strikes last month which, Yemen claims, killed dozens of AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula] operatives. A number of former Iraqi officers, some of them members of Saddam’s feared intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, were recruited to the service."
"They are involved in training and also intelligence gathering," the Telegraph quoted a former Yemeni security officer saying.
This was not the first time the CIA has allied with the Ba’athist Party. It did the same thing back in 1968 against a supposedly greater adversary, a Soviet-allied military Iraqi dictator. We got Saddam Hussein as the new dictator in his place. The CIA’s history with both the Ba’athist Party and al-Qaeda is long and twisted:
• 1968: The CIA helped to install Saddam Hussein’s Ba’thist Party in a bloody 1968 coup, of which Hussein was party secretary.
• 1982: The CIA creates the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan to fight Soviet aggression, which becomes Al Qaeda. (Osama bin Ladin himself started his radicalism with his activity in Afghanistan.)
• 2001: The U.S. government goes to Afghanistan to destroy the al-Qaeda/Taliban organization it had helped to establish with the anti-Soviet mujaheddin in the 1980s.
• 2003: The U.S. government goes to Iraq to destroy the dictator that its CIA had helped to install back in 1968.
• 2004-09: The U.S. government establishes Saddam Hussein’s henchmen as an influential power block in Yemen.
• 2009-10: The United States goes abroad to Yemen and begins bombing missions to defeat a brand new terrorist threat from Yemen.
With such a history, one might wonder: Is the CIA to be trusted when it talks about an “intelligence success” in helping former Ba’athists?
President John Quincy Adams said in a July 4, 1821 (as U.S. Secretary of State) address to the House of Representatives of his country that “she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” It’s still true, though we don’t have to search for monsters. We now go abroad and raise up the monsters first, before we then go back to destroy the monsters we created.
