Rick Atkinson Quotes
I think the Bush Administration had basically inherited a policy toward Iraq from the Reagan/Bush Administration that saw Iraq as a kind of fire wall against Iranian fundamentalism. And as it developed over the 1980s, it became a real political run-a-muck... even though the Iraqis were known to be harboring Palestinian terrorists.
Atkinson, Rick. Interview. Frontline: The Gulf War, PBS, 9 Jan. 1996.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
Ironically Germany which has publicly usually been so sensitive and responsible after their massive chemical extermination in the concentration camps of WWII, was embarrassed by their own private companies which, to make money, sold the chemicals and the technology to the then worst murderer in the world.
Despite being a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the senator seemed to be unaware that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the ex-ruler of Iran, had died in 1989, 7 years earlier.
Scowcroft and Colin Powell had been key military and security advisors to President George W. Bush’s father when he was President. The younger Bush had no foreign policy or military experience, and he and his party assured the public that with men like Scowcroft and Powell advising him, all would be well. However, when Bush thought of invading Iraq, Scowcroft and Powell strongly advised him against it, but the younger Bush ignored the advice of these men who had served the nation so well under his father. Scowcroft’s warning could not have been more accurate.
Lawrence Rush "Rick" Atkinson IV is an American author, most recently of The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777, the first volume in the Revolution Trilogy. He has won Pulitzer Prizes in history and journalism.
