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I mean, Iraq was an ally of the USA against Iran to the point of spending 8 years engaging in a proxy war for the USA against Iran that killed something like 1.2 million people combined.
The US doesn’t have allies. It uses countries and proxies as long as they are useful and then it discards them.
Yes the US and Europe had given all kinds of weapons to Saddam, including chemical weapons, to use against Iran. But they eventually turned on him, just like they turned on their puppet narcodictator Noriega in Panama.
One reason for this was that it was no longer as convenient for the US to have puppet military dictators in the post-Soviet period. They became too much of a PR liability and the MO of the US changed to doing color revolutions to install ostensible “liberal democracies” which were just as easy to control through NED, USAID, etc. but allowed the West to maintain a “cleaner” image.
Another reason was that Saddam had been in power for so long that he was turning more nationalistic and began to show too much independence for Washington’s liking. The last straw was when he wanted to start selling oil in Euros rather than dollars, but they wanted to get rid of him long before that.
I’m sorry if my response came across as pedantic. It wasn’t my intention to “win” anything, i only wanted to introduce some nuance into this discussion and bring up a few additional things to think about.
