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![]() | On 1 August 2021, it was proposed that this article be moved to Central Intelligence Agency activities in Iraq. The result of the discussion was not moved. |
See Talk:Central Intelligence Agency/Country Article Style Rules
Does anyone see how big the reliability issues are here? This page is an embarrassment to wikpedia 162.213.136.97 ( talk) 04:22, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
The treatment of the Kurdish issue is very POV. If you quote Kissinger, why not quote his memoirs?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.149.79.49 ( talk) 23:52, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
Seems to have a huge gaping hole in actual historical coverage--from 1996 to 2002. This just screams BULLSHIT! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.102.186 ( talk) 03:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
While I fully admit that this is not my area of expertise, I am not aware of any evidence in any reliable source to suggest that the U.S. began tilting towards Iraq until the Iranian invasion of Iraq in 1982. Of course, Left-wing bloggers and Wikipedia editors who have written about the temporary U.S.-Saddam alliance tend to completely obscure all of the relevant context (assuming, perhaps too generously, they even possess the most cursory knowledge about the subject), to the point of pretending that the West was supporting Iraqi aggression against Iran—rather than trying to prevent Iran from completely overrunning and conquering all of Iraq. Yet the only "weapons" the U.S. ever sold Saddam were a few hundred million dollars worth of helicopters, and it was not until 1984 that the U.S. and Iraq resumed diplomatic relations. (
Conspiracy nuts will tell you that the President Carter secretly "green-lit" Saddam's attack in September 1980, but there's not much
evidence to suggest this occurred.) Now, to the CIA's role: I confess I haven't read Charlie Wilson's War, but (as is too often the case with seemingly-impeccably sourced content on Wikipedia) there is nothing in the quote provided to assuage my doubts that Wilson actually says what Wikipedia would lead readers to believe: Namely, that the CIA began "militarily and monetarily" supporting (itself an odd formulation) Iraq as early as 1980. In Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979-1988 (pp. 21, 113-115), former CIA Near East and South Asia Division deputy chief and later division chief Thomas Twetton recounts in detail how he "was sent to Baghdad in the summer of 1982 to deliver satellite imagery—maps, battle line imagery (ten or fifteen miles behind the battle lines)—to the Iraqis." According to Twetton, this was "the first U.S. provision of intelligence to Iraq" during the war, leaving his Iraqi counterparts in "shock" and "disbelief at discovering that they had a CIA officer in their midst," and sparking a short-lived debate over whether Iraq would even allow a CIA presence. Twetton reiterates that "the beginning of the tilt toward Iraq did not happen until the summer of 1982." Therefore, I am considering removing the current reference, although it would probably take someone with greater knowledge about the Iran-Iraq war to offer a more comprehensive account of the CIA's role in the conflict (if it can even be considered a distinct topic given the sheer number of U.S. agencies involved). (Finally, I am aware of the more serious challenge to my argument; namely, that the U.S. policy of strict neutrality that prevailed prior to 1982 was itself tilted towards Iraq because the U.S. refused to condemn Iraq's aggression. Alas, the origins of the Iran-Iraq war are sufficiently muddled that ascertaining who was the aggressor is not as clear-cut as anyone on either side of the Iraq debate would like to admit.) I'd add that the U.S. policy was never actually to prolong the war and thereby bleed both sides in equal measure, notwithstanding all mythology to the contrary; U.S. policy-makers were hardly smart enough or in enough control of events to even attempt such a stratagem. Western aid prolonged the war in the sense that it saved Iraq from collapse, but this did not contradict the official U.S. position that there should be an immediate ceasefire, because after 1982 Iraq was constantly calling for an immediate ceasefire even on terms favorable to the other side.
TheTimesAreAChanging (
talk)
05:47, 7 April 2016 (UTC)
-- https://fas.org/irp/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html Ussliberty ( talk) 09:34, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
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I don't yet have the time to purchase, read through, and incorporate all relevant material from Nathan J. Citino's Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in US-Arab Relations, 1945–1967 (2017) into this and other Wikipedia articles. However, based on Google Books snippets, it appears that Citino's book provides many important new insights into the dark and sordid history of U.S. support for the first Ba'thist government in Iraq, which remains a stain on U.S.—Iraq relations quite apart from whether or not the CIA directly arranged the coup itself. (In addition, there was a tantalizing glimpse that there may be yet more to the CIA's spring 1960 poisoned handkerchief scheme.) "The more you know, the more you know you don't know." TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 21:30, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Read on for spoilers:
|
---|
If you check the date of the cited memo in which Barnes approved the "special operation," you will see that approval was not given until April of 1962, more than two years after Critchfield first broached the idea. Given that Mahdawi was stricken with "influenza" in early 1962, it is possible that the CIA successfully poisoned him, after all. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 04:57, 27 June 2017 (UTC) |
According to
Aleiraq Aleazim,
"Likewise, more than a decade prior to the UPI report, an anonymous former high-ranking State Department official had told scholars, Marion and Peter Slugett (sic), that Saddam and other Ba'athists made contact with American authorities some time during the late 1950s and early 1960s," citing Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (one of the standard histories of Iraq),
p. 297. I had only read a few snippets from this book and one article by Peter Sluglett previously (namely Sluglett's
review of Batatu's Old Social Classes), but I was about 99% certain that the book does not contain any such sensational claim about Saddam—and now I'm at 100%. Anyone can check the Google Books
link and confirm for themselves that p. 297 (from the chapter "The Invasion of Kuwait and Its Aftermath") says nothing of the kind; I also checked
p. 97 before commenting here in case the issue was a simple typo or innocent misunderstanding, finding—you guessed it–nothing! It seems undeniable that Aleiraq Aleazim fabricated this citation, if not out of whole cloth then by copying a fabricated citation from somewhere else on the Internet (and most likely conflating these fictional assertions about Saddam personally meeting with Americans in the late 1950s with the discussion of the anti-communist purge of 1963 on
p. 86 and what the Slugletts characterize as "conjecture"
about how it was organized). The Slugletts briefly summarize the attempt on Qasim's life on
pp. 72–73, never suggesting that it was anything but an internal Iraqi affair or going beyond what you would expect to see in a standard history of Iraq (despite it having received significant coverage for decades, Sale in April 2003 was the first source to allege American involvement in the attempted assassination, and no RS has since been able to corroborate Sale's report). If there are any admins watching this page: What, if anything, can be done about an editor caught abusing Wikipedia as a venue to perpetuate blatant
WP:HOAXes like this?
TheTimesAreAChanging (
talk)
07:55, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
"American authorities"developed into a working collaborative relationship or that the U.S. played a role in the Ba'athist assassination attempt of October 1959, so it still seems needlessly argumentative (as well as a form of WP:OR/ WP:SYNTH) to introduce this text with
"Likewise, more than a decade prior to the UPI report ... "—the Slugletts simply do not corroborate any of the salacious details from Sale's article, beyond a general willingness on the part of U.S. officials to meet with Qasim's opponents. (You might recall that various "contacts" between al-Qaeda and Saddam's government later fueled conspiracy theories about a collaborative relationship that were never proven and are unsupported by the Iraqi archives.) As far as I can tell, the closest that the Slugletts come to addressing collaboration can be found on p. 86:
"Although individual leftists had been murdered intermittently over the previous years, the scale on which the killings and arrests took place in the spring and summer of 1963 indicates a closely coordinated campaign, and it is almost certain that those who carried out the raid on suspects' homes were working from lists supplied to them. Precisely how these lists had been compiled is a matter of conjecture, but it is certain that some of the Ba'th leaders were in touch with American intelligence networks, and it is also undeniable that a variety of different groups in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East had a strong vested interest in breaking what was probably the strongest and most popular communist party in the region."(Footnote 3 here may very well correspond to the same citation on p. 327, especially because the partial excerpt also quotes King Hussein's allegations, although that cannot be confirmed from the Google Books preview—in other words, the Slugletts describe U.S.–Ba'athist cooperation during the 1963 anti-communist purge as
"a matter of conjecture"and do not hint at U.S. participation in the assassination attempt of 1959.) On a side note, most scholars (even those, like Karsh, who say that Saddam may have visited the U.S. embassy in Cairo—and Karsh is careful to present that as a rumor, not a confirmed fact) do not believe that Saddam personally would have had occasion to "contact" U.S. authorities prior to his Egyptian exile (it would be very surprising if the Slugletts said otherwise, but, technically, they do not)—after all, as Osgood says, Saddam was a last-minute addition to the hit squad in 1959. Innuendo aside, even proof that Saddam once visited a U.S. embassy wouldn't establish far-reaching conspiracy theories about Saddam's alleged collusion with America. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 20:47, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved. While there is some policy-based support for expanding the names, there far stronger support for the status quo. After the relist, shortly before which a stronger oppose rationale was presented, most comments have been in opposition. ( closed by non-admin page mover) Elli ( talk | contribs) 04:03, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
– Expand abbreviation. The corresponding Category:CIA activities tree will need to be renamed at CfD if this goes through. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 01:07, 1 August 2021 (UTC) — Relisting. Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 03:47, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
If you want to relist a discussion and then participate in it, be prepared to explain why you think it was appropriate.
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | On 1 August 2021, it was proposed that this article be moved to Central Intelligence Agency activities in Iraq. The result of the discussion was not moved. |
See Talk:Central Intelligence Agency/Country Article Style Rules
Does anyone see how big the reliability issues are here? This page is an embarrassment to wikpedia 162.213.136.97 ( talk) 04:22, 18 June 2017 (UTC)
The treatment of the Kurdish issue is very POV. If you quote Kissinger, why not quote his memoirs?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.149.79.49 ( talk) 23:52, 2 November 2012 (UTC)
Seems to have a huge gaping hole in actual historical coverage--from 1996 to 2002. This just screams BULLSHIT! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.213.102.186 ( talk) 03:32, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
While I fully admit that this is not my area of expertise, I am not aware of any evidence in any reliable source to suggest that the U.S. began tilting towards Iraq until the Iranian invasion of Iraq in 1982. Of course, Left-wing bloggers and Wikipedia editors who have written about the temporary U.S.-Saddam alliance tend to completely obscure all of the relevant context (assuming, perhaps too generously, they even possess the most cursory knowledge about the subject), to the point of pretending that the West was supporting Iraqi aggression against Iran—rather than trying to prevent Iran from completely overrunning and conquering all of Iraq. Yet the only "weapons" the U.S. ever sold Saddam were a few hundred million dollars worth of helicopters, and it was not until 1984 that the U.S. and Iraq resumed diplomatic relations. (
Conspiracy nuts will tell you that the President Carter secretly "green-lit" Saddam's attack in September 1980, but there's not much
evidence to suggest this occurred.) Now, to the CIA's role: I confess I haven't read Charlie Wilson's War, but (as is too often the case with seemingly-impeccably sourced content on Wikipedia) there is nothing in the quote provided to assuage my doubts that Wilson actually says what Wikipedia would lead readers to believe: Namely, that the CIA began "militarily and monetarily" supporting (itself an odd formulation) Iraq as early as 1980. In Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979-1988 (pp. 21, 113-115), former CIA Near East and South Asia Division deputy chief and later division chief Thomas Twetton recounts in detail how he "was sent to Baghdad in the summer of 1982 to deliver satellite imagery—maps, battle line imagery (ten or fifteen miles behind the battle lines)—to the Iraqis." According to Twetton, this was "the first U.S. provision of intelligence to Iraq" during the war, leaving his Iraqi counterparts in "shock" and "disbelief at discovering that they had a CIA officer in their midst," and sparking a short-lived debate over whether Iraq would even allow a CIA presence. Twetton reiterates that "the beginning of the tilt toward Iraq did not happen until the summer of 1982." Therefore, I am considering removing the current reference, although it would probably take someone with greater knowledge about the Iran-Iraq war to offer a more comprehensive account of the CIA's role in the conflict (if it can even be considered a distinct topic given the sheer number of U.S. agencies involved). (Finally, I am aware of the more serious challenge to my argument; namely, that the U.S. policy of strict neutrality that prevailed prior to 1982 was itself tilted towards Iraq because the U.S. refused to condemn Iraq's aggression. Alas, the origins of the Iran-Iraq war are sufficiently muddled that ascertaining who was the aggressor is not as clear-cut as anyone on either side of the Iraq debate would like to admit.) I'd add that the U.S. policy was never actually to prolong the war and thereby bleed both sides in equal measure, notwithstanding all mythology to the contrary; U.S. policy-makers were hardly smart enough or in enough control of events to even attempt such a stratagem. Western aid prolonged the war in the sense that it saved Iraq from collapse, but this did not contradict the official U.S. position that there should be an immediate ceasefire, because after 1982 Iraq was constantly calling for an immediate ceasefire even on terms favorable to the other side.
TheTimesAreAChanging (
talk)
05:47, 7 April 2016 (UTC)
-- https://fas.org/irp/congress/2002_cr/s092002.html Ussliberty ( talk) 09:34, 18 July 2017 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on CIA activities in Iraq. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{
Sourcecheck}}
).
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 05:05, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
I don't yet have the time to purchase, read through, and incorporate all relevant material from Nathan J. Citino's Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in US-Arab Relations, 1945–1967 (2017) into this and other Wikipedia articles. However, based on Google Books snippets, it appears that Citino's book provides many important new insights into the dark and sordid history of U.S. support for the first Ba'thist government in Iraq, which remains a stain on U.S.—Iraq relations quite apart from whether or not the CIA directly arranged the coup itself. (In addition, there was a tantalizing glimpse that there may be yet more to the CIA's spring 1960 poisoned handkerchief scheme.) "The more you know, the more you know you don't know." TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 21:30, 31 May 2017 (UTC)
Read on for spoilers:
|
---|
If you check the date of the cited memo in which Barnes approved the "special operation," you will see that approval was not given until April of 1962, more than two years after Critchfield first broached the idea. Given that Mahdawi was stricken with "influenza" in early 1962, it is possible that the CIA successfully poisoned him, after all. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 04:57, 27 June 2017 (UTC) |
According to
Aleiraq Aleazim,
"Likewise, more than a decade prior to the UPI report, an anonymous former high-ranking State Department official had told scholars, Marion and Peter Slugett (sic), that Saddam and other Ba'athists made contact with American authorities some time during the late 1950s and early 1960s," citing Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship (one of the standard histories of Iraq),
p. 297. I had only read a few snippets from this book and one article by Peter Sluglett previously (namely Sluglett's
review of Batatu's Old Social Classes), but I was about 99% certain that the book does not contain any such sensational claim about Saddam—and now I'm at 100%. Anyone can check the Google Books
link and confirm for themselves that p. 297 (from the chapter "The Invasion of Kuwait and Its Aftermath") says nothing of the kind; I also checked
p. 97 before commenting here in case the issue was a simple typo or innocent misunderstanding, finding—you guessed it–nothing! It seems undeniable that Aleiraq Aleazim fabricated this citation, if not out of whole cloth then by copying a fabricated citation from somewhere else on the Internet (and most likely conflating these fictional assertions about Saddam personally meeting with Americans in the late 1950s with the discussion of the anti-communist purge of 1963 on
p. 86 and what the Slugletts characterize as "conjecture"
about how it was organized). The Slugletts briefly summarize the attempt on Qasim's life on
pp. 72–73, never suggesting that it was anything but an internal Iraqi affair or going beyond what you would expect to see in a standard history of Iraq (despite it having received significant coverage for decades, Sale in April 2003 was the first source to allege American involvement in the attempted assassination, and no RS has since been able to corroborate Sale's report). If there are any admins watching this page: What, if anything, can be done about an editor caught abusing Wikipedia as a venue to perpetuate blatant
WP:HOAXes like this?
TheTimesAreAChanging (
talk)
07:55, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
"American authorities"developed into a working collaborative relationship or that the U.S. played a role in the Ba'athist assassination attempt of October 1959, so it still seems needlessly argumentative (as well as a form of WP:OR/ WP:SYNTH) to introduce this text with
"Likewise, more than a decade prior to the UPI report ... "—the Slugletts simply do not corroborate any of the salacious details from Sale's article, beyond a general willingness on the part of U.S. officials to meet with Qasim's opponents. (You might recall that various "contacts" between al-Qaeda and Saddam's government later fueled conspiracy theories about a collaborative relationship that were never proven and are unsupported by the Iraqi archives.) As far as I can tell, the closest that the Slugletts come to addressing collaboration can be found on p. 86:
"Although individual leftists had been murdered intermittently over the previous years, the scale on which the killings and arrests took place in the spring and summer of 1963 indicates a closely coordinated campaign, and it is almost certain that those who carried out the raid on suspects' homes were working from lists supplied to them. Precisely how these lists had been compiled is a matter of conjecture, but it is certain that some of the Ba'th leaders were in touch with American intelligence networks, and it is also undeniable that a variety of different groups in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East had a strong vested interest in breaking what was probably the strongest and most popular communist party in the region."(Footnote 3 here may very well correspond to the same citation on p. 327, especially because the partial excerpt also quotes King Hussein's allegations, although that cannot be confirmed from the Google Books preview—in other words, the Slugletts describe U.S.–Ba'athist cooperation during the 1963 anti-communist purge as
"a matter of conjecture"and do not hint at U.S. participation in the assassination attempt of 1959.) On a side note, most scholars (even those, like Karsh, who say that Saddam may have visited the U.S. embassy in Cairo—and Karsh is careful to present that as a rumor, not a confirmed fact) do not believe that Saddam personally would have had occasion to "contact" U.S. authorities prior to his Egyptian exile (it would be very surprising if the Slugletts said otherwise, but, technically, they do not)—after all, as Osgood says, Saddam was a last-minute addition to the hit squad in 1959. Innuendo aside, even proof that Saddam once visited a U.S. embassy wouldn't establish far-reaching conspiracy theories about Saddam's alleged collusion with America. TheTimesAreAChanging ( talk) 20:47, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: not moved. While there is some policy-based support for expanding the names, there far stronger support for the status quo. After the relist, shortly before which a stronger oppose rationale was presented, most comments have been in opposition. ( closed by non-admin page mover) Elli ( talk | contribs) 04:03, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
– Expand abbreviation. The corresponding Category:CIA activities tree will need to be renamed at CfD if this goes through. – LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄) 01:07, 1 August 2021 (UTC) — Relisting. Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 03:47, 17 August 2021 (UTC)
If you want to relist a discussion and then participate in it, be prepared to explain why you think it was appropriate.