Question: Why would the U.S. overthrow secular governments in the Middle East

[JHB]

25. See the Wesley Clark interviews in this thread...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017106588

He recounts a 1991 conversation he had with Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon (Wolfo was the #3 man there at the time), where PW laments not ousting Saddam and has his eye on "cleaning up" the old Soviet client states in the region. That view can be seen later in the policies PNAC advocated, and under Dubya they had the chance to try it.

I don't have the timing for the first video, but on the second it starts at the 3:10 mark.

Clarke also notes that this conversation took place just after the Shia uprising, also noting that we provoked it then stood aside. The thing to remember with that incident is that (Poppy) Bush had been fishing for a coup d'etat by the Iraqi military or elements within to oust Saddam. That would let him declare victory and go home with Iraq safely in the hands of a new friendly dictator or junta, even if that was just as bad or worse for the average Iraqi.

However, one thing Saddam was good at was preventing anyone else from gaining enough of a power base to challenge him. Nobody in the army stuck their neck out into the chopping block, but the shias took Bush up on his invitation to rise up. They wouldn't be quite so easily influenced, though, and the uprising threatened to split the country in three (the third being the Kurdish area). So Bush had our forces stand by while Saddam put it down, and the country (& and our forces' mission there) stayed in limbo for the next 10 years, apparently waiting for Saddam to keel over of his own accord. That also kept us in Saudi Arabia, and one of the things that had Osama bin Laden in a lather was our infidel presence in holy (to him) lands. So Poppy's non-solution was one of the things fueling al Queda. Huzzah!

One of the big alarm bells with the 2002(3?) authorization of force (other than its passing in the first place) was how geographically open-ended it was. If he had the chance, Bush could have used it to push on to the other countries on the neocon list.