We Finally Got Our Monster

... and he was in a spider hole! Meanwhile, anybody know where the guy is who killed 3,000 people on 9/11? Our - Frankenstein's - other monster? Maybe he's in a mouse hole.

Michael Moore

Updated on: 16 December 2003 12:00 am

Thank God Saddam is finally back in American hands! He must have really missed us. Man, he sure looked bad!But, at least he got a free dental exam today. That's something most Americans can't get.

America used to like Saddam. We LOVED Saddam. We funded him. We armed him. We helped him gas Iraniantroops.

But then he screwed up. He invaded the dictatorship of Kuwait and, in doing so, did the worst thing imaginable-- he threatened an even BETTER friend of ours: the dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, and its vast oil reserves.The Bushes and the Saudi royal family were and are close business partners, and Saddam, back in 1990,committed a royal blunder by getting a little too close to their wealthy holdings. Things went downhill forSaddam from there.

But it wasn't always that way. Saddam was our good friend and ally. We supported his regime. It wasn’tthe first time we had helped a murderer. We liked playing Dr. Frankenstein. We created a lot of monsters --the Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile -- and then we expressed ignorance or shock when theyran amok and massacred people. We liked Saddam because he was willing to fight the Ayatollah. So we made surethat he got billions of dollars to purchase weapons. Weapons of mass destruction. That's right, he had them.We should know -- we gave them to him!

We allowed and encouraged American corporations to do business with Saddam in the 1980s. That's how he gotchemical and biological agents so he could use them in chemical and biological weapons. Here's the list ofsome of the stuff we sent him (according to a 1994 U.S. Senate report):

Bacillus Anthracis, cause of anthrax.
Clostridium Botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin.
Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord, and heart.
Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs.
Clostridium Perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness.
Clostridium tetani, a highly toxigenic substance.

And here are some of the American corporations who helped to prop Saddam up by doing business with him:AT&T, Bechtel, Caterpillar, Dow Chemical, Dupont, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM (for a full list ofcompanies and descriptions of how they helped Saddam, gohere.

We were so cozy with dear old Saddam that we decided to feed him satellite images so he could locate wherethe Iranian troops were. We pretty much knew how he would use the information, and sure enough, as soon as wesent him the spy photos, he gassed those troops. And we kept quiet. Because he was our friend and the Iranianswere the "enemy." A year after he first gassed the Iranians, we reestablished full diplomaticrelations with him!

Later he gassed his own people, the Kurds. You would think that would force us to disassociate ourselves fromhim. Congress tried to impose economic sanctions on Saddam, but the Reagan White House quickly rejected thatidea -- they wouldn’t let anything derail their good buddy Saddam. We had a virtual love fest with thisFrankenstein whom we (in part) created.

And, just like the mythical Frankenstein, Saddam eventually spun out of control. He would no longer do what hewas told by his master. Saddam had to be caught. And now that he has been brought back from the wilderness,perhaps he will have something to say about his creators. Maybe we can learn something... interesting. MaybeDon Rumsfeld could smile and shake Saddam's hand again. Just like he did when he went to see him in 1983 (seethe photo here)

Maybe we never would have been in the situation we're in if Rumsfeld, Bush, Sr., and company hadn't been soexcited back in the 80s about their friendly monster in the desert.

Meanwhile, anybody know where the guy is who killed 3,000 people on 9/11? Our - Frankenstein's - othermonster? Maybe he's in a mouse hole.

So many of our little monsters, so little time before the next election.

Stay strong, Democratic candidates. Quit sounding like a bunch of wusses. These bastards sent us to war on alie, the killing will not stop, the Arab world hates us with a passion, and we will pay for this out of ourpockets for years to come. Nothing that happened today (or in the past 9 months) has made us ONE BIT safer inour post-9/11 world. Saddam was never a threat to our national security.