I was wrong about Tony Abbott

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What is known as 'the left' were maligned during the wmd debacle.

Portrayed as saddam lovers, which was far from the truth, our beef was OUR leaders abandoning decent standards and becoming more despotic like saddam, using the 'threat' of saddam ironically.

It was all about our leadership and its failings

Why would the left support right wing despots or worse, right wing religious zealots ?
 
Pessimistic said:
What is known as 'the left' were maligned during the wmd debacle.

Portrayed as saddam lovers, which was far from the truth, our beef was OUR leaders abandoning decent standards and becoming more despotic like saddam, using the 'threat' of saddam ironically.

It was all about our leadership and its failings

Why would the left support right wing despots or worse, right wing religious zealots ?
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Iraq was like Pandora's box. However, most people with 1/2 a brain knew what would happen when we pulled the lid off it. A bloody mess.

Many of us old enough to remember the success we had in Vietnam when the USA spent years bombing the s**t out of the place, & Australia joining in with Harold Holt's 'all the way with LBJ' sycophantic crap. We are still paying for that wonderful military endeavour.

When will the idiots learn?
 

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madmug said:
So why then are we so keen to bomb Syria? Seeing how well it worked in Iraq 'n all that?
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I wonder if xsess releases Saddam was put in there by the US in I believe the late seventies ( at my age I don't remember every exact detail) and we also funded and backed the taliban.
 
rodney hoo said:
I wonder if xsess releases Saddam was put in there by the US in I believe the late seventies ( at my age I don't remember every exact detail) and we also funded and backed the taliban.
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Saddam was supported by the USA during the Iraq/Iran war of the 1980's. The US also supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Russians from 1979. The USA ME policy has been illogical & short term all along. Except of course their permanent acceptance of what ever Israel & the ultra corrupt Saud Family of Saudi Arabia want to do.

One would think they would learn & be a bit more even handed.

Speaking to Iran is a start at least.
 
this is a read that shows Saddam did good for Iraq, if you toe the line. The political programs on health and education were excellent. Farming subsidies if you vote for him.

My computer skills are crap(age thing) so I hope this works.


Rise to power
Further information: History of Iraq under Ba'athist rule
Of the 16 members of Qasim's cabinet, 12 were Ba'ath Party members; however, the party turned against Qasim due to his refusal to join Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic.[18] To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism.[19] Later that year, the Ba'ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine. The majority of its members were either educated professionals or students, and Saddam fit the bill.[20] The choice of Saddam was, according to historian Con Coughlin, "hardly surprising". The idea of assassinating Qasim may have been Nasser's, and there is speculation that some of those who participated in the operation received training in Damascus, which was then part of the UAR.[21]

The assassins planned to ambush Qasim at Al-Rashid Street on 7 October 1959: one man was to kill those sitting at the back of the car, the rest killing those in front. During the ambush it is claimed that Saddam began shooting prematurely, which disorganised the whole operation. Qasim's chauffeur was killed, and Qasim was hit in the arm and shoulder. The assassins believed they had killed him and quickly retreated to their headquarters, but Qasim survived. At the time of the attack the Ba'ath Party had less than 1,000 members.[22]

Some of the plotters quickly managed to leave the country for Syria, the spiritual home of Ba'athist ideology. There Saddam was given full-membership in the party by Michel Aflaq.[23] Some members of the operation were arrested and taken into custody by the Iraqi government. At the show trial, six of the defendants were given the death sentence; for unknown reasons the sentences were not carried out. Aflaq, the leader of the Ba'athist movement, organised the expulsion of leading Iraqi Ba'athist members, such as Fuad al-Rikabi, on the grounds that the party should not have initiated the attempt on Qasim's life. At the same time, Aflaq managed to secure seats in the Iraqi Ba'ath leadership for his supporters, one them being Saddam.[24] Saddam fled to Egypt in 1959, and he continued to live there until 1963.

Many foreign countries opposed Qasim, particularly after he threatened to invade Kuwait. In February 1960, the CIA created an unrelated plan to oust Qasim by giving him a poisoned handkerchief, although it may have been aborted.[25]

Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadan Revolution coup of 1963. Ba'athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. The governments of the United States and United Kingdom were complicit in the coup.[26] Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba'athist leaders later that year in the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état.

Arif died in a plane crash in 1966, in what may have been an act of sabotage by Ba'athist elements in the Iraqi military.[27]Abd ar-Rahman al-Bazzaz became acting president for three days, and a power struggle for the presidency occurred. In the first meeting of the Defense Council and cabinet to elect a president, Al-Bazzaz needed a two-thirds majority to win the presidency. Al-Bazzaz was unsuccessful, and Abdul Rahman Arif was elected president. He was viewed by army officers as weaker and easier to manipulate than his brother.[28]

Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964. In 1966, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed him Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command. Saddam escaped from prison in 1967. Saddam, who would prove to be a skilled organiser, revitalised the party.[29] He was elected to the Regional Command, as the story goes, with help from Michel Aflaq—the founder of Ba'athist thought.[30]

In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif. Saddam and Salah Omar al-Ali contacted Ba'athists in the military and helped lead them on the ground.[31] Arif was given refuge in London and then Istanbul.[27] Al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy, and deputy chairman of the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council. According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba'athist government, which formed the basis for his measures to promote Ba'ath party unity as well as his resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability. Although Saddam was al-Bakr's deputy, he was a strong behind-the-scenes party politician. Al-Bakr was the older and more prestigious of the two, but by 1969 Saddam clearly had become the moving force behind the party.

Political program

Promoting women's literacy and education in the 1970s
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, formally the al-Bakr's second-in-command, Saddam built a reputation as a progressive, effective politician.[32] At this time, Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba'ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following.

After the Ba'athists took power in 1968, Saddam focused on attaining stability in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant.[33] The desire for stable rule in a country rife with factionalism led Saddam to pursue both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.[33]

Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs.

At the center of this strategy was Iraq's oil. On 1 June 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, which, at the time, dominated the country's oil sector. A year later, world oil prices rose dramatically as a result of the 1973 energy crisis, and skyrocketing revenues enabled Saddam to expand his agenda.


Saddam seen talking to Michel Aflaq, the founder of ba'athist thought, in 1988.
Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).[34][35]

With the help of increasing oil revenues, Saddam diversified the largely oil-based Iraqi economy. Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign helped Iraq's energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas. Before the 1970s, most of Iraq's people lived in the countryside and roughly two-thirds were peasants. This number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise from less than a half billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars and the country invested into industrial expansion.

The oil revenue benefitted Saddam politically.[36] According to The Economist, "Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanising German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. He had a good instinct for what the "Arab street" demanded, following the decline in Egyptian leadership brought about by the trauma of Israel's six-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970, and the "traitorous" drive by his successor, Anwar Sadat, to sue for peace with the Jewish state. Saddam's self-aggrandising propaganda, with himself posing as the defender of Arabism against Jewish or Persian intruders, was heavy-handed, but consistent as a drumbeat. It helped, of course, that his mukhabarat (secret police) put dozens of Arab news editors, writers and artists on the payroll."[36]


Alexei Kosygin (left) and Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr signing the Iraqi–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-Operation in 1972
In 1972, Saddam signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. According to historian Charles R. H. Tripp, the Ba'athist coup of 1968 upset "the US-sponsored security system established as part of the Cold War in the Middle East. It appeared that any enemy of the Baghdad regime was a potential ally of the United States."[37] From 1973-5, the CIA colluded with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran to finance and arm Kurdish rebels in the Second Kurdish–Iraqi War in an attempt to weaken al-Bakr. When Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers Agreement in 1975, the support ceased.[37]

Saddam focused on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athists in the rural areas. After nationalizing foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture on a large scale, and distributing land to peasant farmers.[15] The Ba'athists established farm cooperatives and the government also doubled expenditures for agricultural development in 1974–1975. Saddam's welfare programs were part of a combination of "carrot and stick" tactics to enhance support for Saddam. The state-owned banks were put under his thumb. Lending was based on cronyism.[8] Development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two million people from other Arab countries and even Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor.[citation needed]
 
rodney hoo said:
this is a read that shows Saddam did good for Iraq, if you toe the line. The political programs on health and education were excellent. Farming subsidies if you vote for him.

My computer skills are crap(age thing) so I hope this works.


Rise to power
Further information: History of Iraq under Ba'athist rule
Of the 16 members of Qasim's cabinet, 12 were Ba'ath Party members; however, the party turned against Qasim due to his refusal to join Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic.[18] To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism.[19] Later that year, the Ba'ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine. The majority of its members were either educated professionals or students, and Saddam fit the bill.[20] The choice of Saddam was, according to historian Con Coughlin, "hardly surprising". The idea of assassinating Qasim may have been Nasser's, and there is speculation that some of those who participated in the operation received training in Damascus, which was then part of the UAR.[21]

The assassins planned to ambush Qasim at Al-Rashid Street on 7 October 1959: one man was to kill those sitting at the back of the car, the rest killing those in front. During the ambush it is claimed that Saddam began shooting prematurely, which disorganised the whole operation. Qasim's chauffeur was killed, and Qasim was hit in the arm and shoulder. The assassins believed they had killed him and quickly retreated to their headquarters, but Qasim survived. At the time of the attack the Ba'ath Party had less than 1,000 members.[22]

Some of the plotters quickly managed to leave the country for Syria, the spiritual home of Ba'athist ideology. There Saddam was given full-membership in the party by Michel Aflaq.[23] Some members of the operation were arrested and taken into custody by the Iraqi government. At the show trial, six of the defendants were given the death sentence; for unknown reasons the sentences were not carried out. Aflaq, the leader of the Ba'athist movement, organised the expulsion of leading Iraqi Ba'athist members, such as Fuad al-Rikabi, on the grounds that the party should not have initiated the attempt on Qasim's life. At the same time, Aflaq managed to secure seats in the Iraqi Ba'ath leadership for his supporters, one them being Saddam.[24] Saddam fled to Egypt in 1959, and he continued to live there until 1963.

Many foreign countries opposed Qasim, particularly after he threatened to invade Kuwait. In February 1960, the CIA created an unrelated plan to oust Qasim by giving him a poisoned handkerchief, although it may have been aborted.[25]

Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadan Revolution coup of 1963. Ba'athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. The governments of the United States and United Kingdom were complicit in the coup.[26] Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba'athist leaders later that year in the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état.

Arif died in a plane crash in 1966, in what may have been an act of sabotage by Ba'athist elements in the Iraqi military.[27]Abd ar-Rahman al-Bazzaz became acting president for three days, and a power struggle for the presidency occurred. In the first meeting of the Defense Council and cabinet to elect a president, Al-Bazzaz needed a two-thirds majority to win the presidency. Al-Bazzaz was unsuccessful, and Abdul Rahman Arif was elected president. He was viewed by army officers as weaker and easier to manipulate than his brother.[28]

Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964. In 1966, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed him Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command. Saddam escaped from prison in 1967. Saddam, who would prove to be a skilled organiser, revitalised the party.[29] He was elected to the Regional Command, as the story goes, with help from Michel Aflaq—the founder of Ba'athist thought.[30]

In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif. Saddam and Salah Omar al-Ali contacted Ba'athists in the military and helped lead them on the ground.[31] Arif was given refuge in London and then Istanbul.[27] Al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy, and deputy chairman of the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council. According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba'athist government, which formed the basis for his measures to promote Ba'ath party unity as well as his resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability. Although Saddam was al-Bakr's deputy, he was a strong behind-the-scenes party politician. Al-Bakr was the older and more prestigious of the two, but by 1969 Saddam clearly had become the moving force behind the party.

Political program

Promoting women's literacy and education in the 1970s
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, formally the al-Bakr's second-in-command, Saddam built a reputation as a progressive, effective politician.[32] At this time, Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba'ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following.

After the Ba'athists took power in 1968, Saddam focused on attaining stability in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant.[33] The desire for stable rule in a country rife with factionalism led Saddam to pursue both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.[33]

Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs.

At the center of this strategy was Iraq's oil. On 1 June 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, which, at the time, dominated the country's oil sector. A year later, world oil prices rose dramatically as a result of the 1973 energy crisis, and skyrocketing revenues enabled Saddam to expand his agenda.


Saddam seen talking to Michel Aflaq, the founder of ba'athist thought, in 1988.
Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).[34][35]

With the help of increasing oil revenues, Saddam diversified the largely oil-based Iraqi economy. Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign helped Iraq's energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas. Before the 1970s, most of Iraq's people lived in the countryside and roughly two-thirds were peasants. This number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise from less than a half billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars and the country invested into industrial expansion.

The oil revenue benefitted Saddam politically.[36] According to The Economist, "Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanising German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. He had a good instinct for what the "Arab street" demanded, following the decline in Egyptian leadership brought about by the trauma of Israel's six-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970, and the "traitorous" drive by his successor, Anwar Sadat, to sue for peace with the Jewish state. Saddam's self-aggrandising propaganda, with himself posing as the defender of Arabism against Jewish or Persian intruders, was heavy-handed, but consistent as a drumbeat. It helped, of course, that his mukhabarat (secret police) put dozens of Arab news editors, writers and artists on the payroll."[36]


Alexei Kosygin (left) and Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr signing the Iraqi–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-Operation in 1972
In 1972, Saddam signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. According to historian Charles R. H. Tripp, the Ba'athist coup of 1968 upset "the US-sponsored security system established as part of the Cold War in the Middle East. It appeared that any enemy of the Baghdad regime was a potential ally of the United States."[37] From 1973-5, the CIA colluded with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran to finance and arm Kurdish rebels in the Second Kurdish–Iraqi War in an attempt to weaken al-Bakr. When Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers Agreement in 1975, the support ceased.[37]

Saddam focused on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athists in the rural areas. After nationalizing foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture on a large scale, and distributing land to peasant farmers.[15] The Ba'athists established farm cooperatives and the government also doubled expenditures for agricultural development in 1974–1975. Saddam's welfare programs were part of a combination of "carrot and stick" tactics to enhance support for Saddam. The state-owned banks were put under his thumb. Lending was based on cronyism.[8] Development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two million people from other Arab countries and even Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor.[citation needed]
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The invasion of Iraq should never have happened, but let's not re-write history when it comes to Saddam.
Westerberg said:
"In this audience, some may be disappointed that my own prime ministership in Australia lasted two years,"

His inability for any self reflection is remarkable, just continued conceited self delusion.

Living his life in accordance with the principles of Dennis Reynolds:

"Your true power comes not from outside sources, but from the delusional stories that you all convince yourselves of. And no one, no one can take that away from you."
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Not sure the Tories will be inviting him back next time he's in the UK after that speech. I'm sure he's received plenty of invitations to UKIP events though.
 
Abbott666's speech may have been better recieved by the left had he instead advised the tremendous business potential of the flood of humanity into Europe. For example gun sales have skyrocketted in Austria and curiously to predominately to young females.
 
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Politics is pretty dull without the reptilian monk, but it's far less embarrassing having a back bencher sprouting this idiocy than a PM.
Him and Corey have some kind of little cult moron love fest going on.....:p
 
rodney hoo said:
this is a read that shows Saddam did good for Iraq, if you toe the line. The political programs on health and education were excellent. Farming subsidies if you vote for him.

My computer skills are crap(age thing) so I hope this works.


Rise to power
Further information: History of Iraq under Ba'athist rule
Of the 16 members of Qasim's cabinet, 12 were Ba'ath Party members; however, the party turned against Qasim due to his refusal to join Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic.[18] To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism.[19] Later that year, the Ba'ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine. The majority of its members were either educated professionals or students, and Saddam fit the bill.[20] The choice of Saddam was, according to historian Con Coughlin, "hardly surprising". The idea of assassinating Qasim may have been Nasser's, and there is speculation that some of those who participated in the operation received training in Damascus, which was then part of the UAR.[21]

The assassins planned to ambush Qasim at Al-Rashid Street on 7 October 1959: one man was to kill those sitting at the back of the car, the rest killing those in front. During the ambush it is claimed that Saddam began shooting prematurely, which disorganised the whole operation. Qasim's chauffeur was killed, and Qasim was hit in the arm and shoulder. The assassins believed they had killed him and quickly retreated to their headquarters, but Qasim survived. At the time of the attack the Ba'ath Party had less than 1,000 members.[22]

Some of the plotters quickly managed to leave the country for Syria, the spiritual home of Ba'athist ideology. There Saddam was given full-membership in the party by Michel Aflaq.[23] Some members of the operation were arrested and taken into custody by the Iraqi government. At the show trial, six of the defendants were given the death sentence; for unknown reasons the sentences were not carried out. Aflaq, the leader of the Ba'athist movement, organised the expulsion of leading Iraqi Ba'athist members, such as Fuad al-Rikabi, on the grounds that the party should not have initiated the attempt on Qasim's life. At the same time, Aflaq managed to secure seats in the Iraqi Ba'ath leadership for his supporters, one them being Saddam.[24] Saddam fled to Egypt in 1959, and he continued to live there until 1963.

Many foreign countries opposed Qasim, particularly after he threatened to invade Kuwait. In February 1960, the CIA created an unrelated plan to oust Qasim by giving him a poisoned handkerchief, although it may have been aborted.[25]

Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadan Revolution coup of 1963. Ba'athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. The governments of the United States and United Kingdom were complicit in the coup.[26] Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba'athist leaders later that year in the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état.

Arif died in a plane crash in 1966, in what may have been an act of sabotage by Ba'athist elements in the Iraqi military.[27]Abd ar-Rahman al-Bazzaz became acting president for three days, and a power struggle for the presidency occurred. In the first meeting of the Defense Council and cabinet to elect a president, Al-Bazzaz needed a two-thirds majority to win the presidency. Al-Bazzaz was unsuccessful, and Abdul Rahman Arif was elected president. He was viewed by army officers as weaker and easier to manipulate than his brother.[28]

Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964. In 1966, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed him Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command. Saddam escaped from prison in 1967. Saddam, who would prove to be a skilled organiser, revitalised the party.[29] He was elected to the Regional Command, as the story goes, with help from Michel Aflaq—the founder of Ba'athist thought.[30]

In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif. Saddam and Salah Omar al-Ali contacted Ba'athists in the military and helped lead them on the ground.[31] Arif was given refuge in London and then Istanbul.[27] Al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy, and deputy chairman of the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council. According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba'athist government, which formed the basis for his measures to promote Ba'ath party unity as well as his resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability. Although Saddam was al-Bakr's deputy, he was a strong behind-the-scenes party politician. Al-Bakr was the older and more prestigious of the two, but by 1969 Saddam clearly had become the moving force behind the party.

Political program

Promoting women's literacy and education in the 1970s
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, formally the al-Bakr's second-in-command, Saddam built a reputation as a progressive, effective politician.[32] At this time, Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba'ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following.

After the Ba'athists took power in 1968, Saddam focused on attaining stability in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant.[33] The desire for stable rule in a country rife with factionalism led Saddam to pursue both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.[33]

Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs.

At the center of this strategy was Iraq's oil. On 1 June 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, which, at the time, dominated the country's oil sector. A year later, world oil prices rose dramatically as a result of the 1973 energy crisis, and skyrocketing revenues enabled Saddam to expand his agenda.


Saddam seen talking to Michel Aflaq, the founder of ba'athist thought, in 1988.
Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).[34][35]

With the help of increasing oil revenues, Saddam diversified the largely oil-based Iraqi economy. Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign helped Iraq's energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas. Before the 1970s, most of Iraq's people lived in the countryside and roughly two-thirds were peasants. This number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise from less than a half billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars and the country invested into industrial expansion.

The oil revenue benefitted Saddam politically.[36] According to The Economist, "Much as Adolf Hitler won early praise for galvanising German industry, ending mass unemployment and building autobahns, Saddam earned admiration abroad for his deeds. He had a good instinct for what the "Arab street" demanded, following the decline in Egyptian leadership brought about by the trauma of Israel's six-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970, and the "traitorous" drive by his successor, Anwar Sadat, to sue for peace with the Jewish state. Saddam's self-aggrandising propaganda, with himself posing as the defender of Arabism against Jewish or Persian intruders, was heavy-handed, but consistent as a drumbeat. It helped, of course, that his mukhabarat (secret police) put dozens of Arab news editors, writers and artists on the payroll."[36]


Alexei Kosygin (left) and Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr signing the Iraqi–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-Operation in 1972
In 1972, Saddam signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. According to historian Charles R. H. Tripp, the Ba'athist coup of 1968 upset "the US-sponsored security system established as part of the Cold War in the Middle East. It appeared that any enemy of the Baghdad regime was a potential ally of the United States."[37] From 1973-5, the CIA colluded with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran to finance and arm Kurdish rebels in the Second Kurdish–Iraqi War in an attempt to weaken al-Bakr. When Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers Agreement in 1975, the support ceased.[37]

Saddam focused on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athists in the rural areas. After nationalizing foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture on a large scale, and distributing land to peasant farmers.[15] The Ba'athists established farm cooperatives and the government also doubled expenditures for agricultural development in 1974–1975. Saddam's welfare programs were part of a combination of "carrot and stick" tactics to enhance support for Saddam. The state-owned banks were put under his thumb. Lending was based on cronyism.[8] Development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two million people from other Arab countries and even Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor.[citation needed]
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Unfortunately whatever good SH had done was far outweighed by all the evil barbarity that he made those who opposed his rule suffer beyond our imagination.
 
noddy said:
Unfortunately whatever good SH had done was far outweighed by all the evil barbarity that he made those who opposed his rule suffer beyond our imagination.
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You should maybe speak to people who have fled the wars, they would take Saddam back.
 
rodney hoo said:
You should maybe speak to people who have fled the wars, they would take Saddam back.
Click to expand...

Most probably right but that scenario only came about by the incompetent way the three amigos handled the aftermath of HS downfall.

Never forgot the stage managed victory parade put on by Bush junior as he disembarked from a fighter plane on some American aircraft carrier when in all his finest glory proclaimed to the free world "Mission Accomplished"
 
Pie eyed said:
Politics is pretty dull without the reptilian monk, but it's far less embarrassing having a back bencher sprouting this idiocy than a PM.
Him and Corey have some kind of little cult moron love fest going on.....:p
Click to expand...

but it makes seeing people link ray hadley rants on facebook sooo much more entertaining.
 
Pessimistic said:
I thought he was just an opportunist, his 'stop the boats' rhetoric just a focus group inspired wedge to shortcut into power.

Turns out he really believes this s**t. I am shocked.

Up till now, the rest of the world will suspect our great country was stupid enough to elect a dangerous ignoramus as PM
In a few days no one will be in any doubt. his speech will confirm all.

"Waves of humanity swamping and changing Europe forever" a huge problem ? That's a description of the history of Europe over millennia you ignorant prick. They have a bigger problem and its the aging population in the west

Peta Credlin is a ****in genius, she got this piece of ignorant s**t elected PM

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Abbott will urge Europe to adopt Australia's asylum seeker policies. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

London: Europe's compassion towards refugees is leading it into "catastrophic error", Tony Abbott is expected to warn a gathering of political leaders in London on Tuesday night. The recently ousted prime minister will reportedly also talk up Australia's policy of asylum seeker boat turnbacks, urging European countries to follow suit.

The professed Catholic, surprisingly, will speak against one of Jesus' 'greatest commandments', according to an excerpt of the speech given to News Corp media ahead of its delivery.

"The imperative to 'love your neighbour as yourself' is at the heart of every Western polity… but right now this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error," Mr Abbott is to say.

Dozens of vessels are still making the journey daily to Greece as thousands flee conflict in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Photo: Getty Images

In the Bible, Jesus is asked what is the greatest commandment and replies "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind... And the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself."

Mr Abbott is due to give the keynote address at the second annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture at London's Guildhall.

The lecture, given in the former British prime minister's memory, accompanies a fundraising event for the Margaret Thatcher Centre, which aims to educate future generations about the UK leader's life, values and achievements.

In a part of the lecture given to News Corp journalists, Mr Abbott says "All countries that say 'anyone who gets here can stay here' are now in peril, given the scale of the population movements that are starting to be seen. There are tens - perhaps hundreds - of millions of people, living in poverty and danger, who might readily seek to enter a Western country if the opportunity is there.

"Who could blame them? Yet no country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself. This is the risk that the countries of Europe now run through misguided altruism."

Mr Abbott says he was "loath to give public advice to other countries" when he was prime minister.

But he says Australia was the only country that had successfully defeated people smuggling, and "our experience should be studied".

"Our moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives," he says. "It's not to provide permanent residency to anyone who would rather live in a prosperous Western country than their own. That's why the countries of Europe, while absolutely obliged to support the countries neighbouring the Syrian conflict, are more than entitled to control their borders against those who are no longer fleeing a conflict but seeking a better life.

"This means turning boats around, for people coming by sea. It means denying entry at the border, for people with no legal right to come; and it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go.

"It will require some force; it will require massive logistics and expense; it will gnaw at our consciences - yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever."

Mr Abbott also says it was "striking how little has been done" to address the problem of ISIS at its source.

"It can't be defeated without more effective local forces on the ground."

"Those who won't use decisive force where needed end up being dictated to by those who will.

"Leaving anywhere, even Syria, to the collective determination of Russia, Iran and Daesh should be too horrible to contemplate."

The previous evening, Mr Abbott had attended drinks at a free market think-tank in London where he offered policy and political tips to a UKIP MEP (member of the European Parliament).

Mr Abbott had been the star guest at an Australian Liberals Abroad event, held at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London.

UKIP is a British right-wing liberal party advocating stricter migration controls including an Australian-style 'stop the boats' policy in the Mediterranean.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-urges-europe-to-adopt-boat-turnbacks-in-response-to-refugee-crisis-20151027-gkk6z9.html#ixzz3pnwhR77J
Follow us: @theage on Twitter | theageAustralia on Facebook
Click to expand...


egg on face.

Tony predicted friday the 13 and you mocked him.
 
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