How did the Saddam dictatorship come to power?
When I was growing up Iraq had a large and combative working class. Initially this was led by a Communist party leadership who were not radical and were simply stooges for Moscow. After 1963 coup the majority of the communist party finally split away in 1967 after a long internal struggle from this leadership and took a very radical turn to push the interests of the working class. Faced with this threat the CIA organised a coup very like the Pinochet coup in Chile. The difference was that the Chilean coup was organised more or less by the army on its own. In Iraq there was a right-wing hodge-podge of the Nationalists, Muslim brotherhood and the Baath party. The coalition proved unstable and it was Saddam and the Baath party that rose to the top with the support and blessing of the CIA. Once the CIA and its allies had put down the progressive forces in Iraq the US began to use Saddam as an instrument in its dirty work to control the entire region. The main job was to weaken Iran by a sa
