US Targets Children

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The only difference between what the USA does and what Germany did is that USA kills innocent civilians in other countries, whereas Germany killed its own civilians.

The death toll is within the same order of magnitude (millions). It is factually correct that millions of civilians died in Vietnam… .

………and that the USA created Al Qaeda.

... By 1968, the Ba'ath had consolidated power and ruled Iraq, and within a few years Saddam, by making alliances with army officers and murdering those who got in his way, surfaced as the most powerful man in the country. The Americans had never liked Karim Kassim and were not unhappy with the Ba'ath coups or with Saddam, who began killing off dissidents, especially the Iraqi Left and including the Iraqi Socialist party. Saddam also repressed minority groups like the Kurds in the north of Iraq, prompting the U.S. to briefly support clandestine efforts to help the Kurds and oust Saddam, but then reversed policy and quit supporting the Kurds in 1975, at which point Saddam murdered about 25,000 of them, and prompted Henry Kissinger's famous explanation that "covert operations is not missionary work.:"

By the 1980s Saddam was one of America's most reliable allies. The greatest threat in the Middle East, from 1979 on, became the Islamic Fundamentalist revolutionaries in Iran, led by Ayotallah Khomenei. Iraq, a sworn enemy of Iran, thus became America's great friend.


In September 1980, Saddam went to war against Iran and the U.S. was there to encourage and support and arm him. Iraq hoped to gain Iranian oil lands, control the Shatt al Arab waterway, and topple Khomenei's Shiite regime. The U.S. became Saddam's biggest patron. In the 1980s, the Reagan junta made off-the-books arms transfers to Iraq and kept them secret from congress, sent about $40 billion in arms to Iraq, and about $5 billion in technology for nuclear and chemical weapons programs.

Throughout this time, Saddam continued to kill and gas dissidents and minorities like the Kurds in Iraq, without any attempt by the U.S. to stop him and, in fact, with American military advisors present in the field. Moreover, in 1987 an Iraqi aircraft bombed U.S. frigate STARK and killed 37 American sailors, but accepted the Iraqi apology and continued to support Saddam. Finally in 1988 the Iran-Iraq war ends, inconclusively, with huge losses of life and money.

Saddam thus faced huge debts because of the war, and with oil revenues dwindling, had to find a way to regain economic strength, and he began to look south at Kuwait, which had actually been a part of Iraq until separated arbitrarily and invented as a country by the British in the 1920s and which had been apparently stealing Iraqi oil via diagonal drilling equipment.
In 1990, however, the U.S. was on good terms with Iraq: Assistant Secretary of State John Kelley called Saddam a "force of moderation" in the Mideast. And U.S. Ambassador April Glasbie, on orders from officials i Washington, told him America "has no opinion on inter-Arab disputes such as your border dispute with Kuwait."

Saddam not illogically took that as a green light and began his invasion on 2 August 1990; Bush initially wavered but was given a pep talk by British P.M. Margaret Thatcher and he decided that "this will not stand." Saddam, one of America's best friends in 1980s, had become the New Hitler, but clearly was a dictator who could proudly wear the "Made in the USA" label.

http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/htdtisgulfwar.html

According to Zbigniew Brzezinski's memoir, the United States initially took a largely neutral position on the Iran–Iraq War, with some minor exceptions. First, the U.S. acted in an attempt to prevent the confrontation from widening, largely in order to prevent additional disruption to world oil supplies and to honor U.S. security assurances to Saudi Arabia. As a result, the U.S. reacted to Soviet troop movements on the border of Iran by informing the Soviet Union that they would defend Iran in the event of Soviet invasion. The U.S. also acted to defend Saudi Arabia, and lobbied the surrounding states not to become involved in the war. ... Second, the United States explored whether the Iran–Iraq War would offer leverage with which to resolve the Iranian Hostage Crisis. In this regard, the Carter administration explored the use of both "carrots," by suggesting that they might offer military assistance to Iran upon release of the hostages, and "sticks," by discouraging Israeli military assistance to Iran and suggesting that they might offer military assistance to Iraq if the Iranians did not release the hostages.

Just chucking this out here, New Zealand holds a peaceful stance in the middle east and has had more progress in stopping the Taliban threat by getting involved with the community instead of simply sending drones and artillery in.

The U.S. was officially neutral regarding the Iran-Iraq war, and claimed that it armed neither side. Iran depended on U.S.-origin weapons, however, and sought them from Israel, Europe, Asia, and South America. Iraq started the war with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal, but needed additional weaponry as the conflict wore on.

Initially, Iraq advanced far into Iranian territory, but was driven back within months. By mid-1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. The U.S., having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its interests, began supporting Iraq: measures already underway to upgrade U.S.-Iraq relations were accelerated, high-level officials exchanged visits, and in February 1982 the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. (It had been included several years earlier because of ties with several Palestinian nationalist groups, not Islamicists sharing the worldview of al-Qaeda. Activism by Iraq's main Shiite Islamicist opposition group, al-Dawa, was a major factor precipitating the war -- stirred by Iran's Islamic revolution, its endeavors included the attempted assassination of Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.)

Prolonging the war was phenomenally expensive. Iraq received massive external financial support from the Gulf states, and assistance through loan programs from the U.S. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing and enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The U.S. Agriculture Department provided taxpayer-guaranteed loans for purchases of American commodities, to the satisfaction of U.S. grain exporters.

I was already familiar with those things, but like I said, I do not expect better of the Taliban. What I said was that I doubt that they have killed as many.

That dunce, April Glasbie gave Saddam the impression that is Saddam invaded Iran the U.S. would not do anything strenuous about it. Given Saddam's appetite for war, that is all the encouragement he needed. No, the U.S. did not explicitly encourage Iraq to make war upon the Ayotallah.

ruveyn

That isn't even close to being accurate, 2007 was the only year the Taliban weren't responsible for over half the civilian deaths occuring in Afghanistan.

Also I forgot I said that the USA told Saddam to invade Iran. Apparently we only gave them the go ahead

I'm willing to admit that no country is perfect. They all have biases, influences, morals and goals unique to the way they live. I like that America has gay rights (to a certain extent), women's rights and freedom of speech. I like that, in America, there is no caste system and one can rise to the top through hard work. Prejudices do exist here as well as poverty, homelessness, apathy and every vice under the sun. Still, I wouldn't trade imperfect America for a country that bans beer and forbids freedom of speech.

In July 1990 Saddam’s diplomats met with the U.S. Ambassador April Glasbie, who told them that Washington would take no position with regard to regional border disputes, a view that Baghdad reasonably assumed was a green light to enter Kuwait, which it did in August 1990. After initial vacillation, President George Bush, bolstered by hawkish advice from British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who exhorted him not “to go wobbly,” declared “this will not stand,” and imposed sanctions and bought an international coalition to oppose Iraq. By November 1990, over a half-million American forces had been deployed to Saudi Arabia and the U.N. Security Council had ordered Iraq to evacuate Kuwait by 15 January 1991 or face attack.

In 1990 Saddam Hussein was preparing to invade Kuwait, but first he requested the approval from the United States. In July of 1990 Saddam’s diplomats met with U.S Ambassador April Glasbie. During their discussion Ms. Glasbie told the Iraqi diplomats that Washington would take no stance on border disputes. The Iraqi diplomats took the statement as a proverbial green light to invade Kuwait, which they proceeded to do in August 1990.

While Iraq was distracted by its war, Kuwait had accumulated 900 square miles of Iraqi territory by advancing its border with Iraq northward. This was presented to Iraq as a fait accompli and it gave Kuwait access to the Rumaila oil field. The Kuwaiti Sheik had purchased the Santa Fe Drilling Corporation of Alhambra, California, for $2.3 billion and proceeded to use its slant drilling equipment to gain access to the Iraqi oil field.