You created ten times as many Al Qaeda fighters when you destroyed Iraq.
Saddam was 'NATO's boy' in that 8 year long war against Iran, after Iran bolted from being owned by Royal Dutch Shell in 1979. The Kuwait invasion was about slant drilling, it was a trap Saddam fell into. When you look at the ending, it is NATO that is acting like a terrorist gone wild:
Madeleine Albright - The deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it for Iraq's non existent WMD's
When you look at the details behind the fall of the USSR it is NATO acting like a terrorist:
Operation Cyclone - Wikipedia
Operation Cyclone was the code name for the
United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program to arm and finance the
Afghan mujahideen in
Afghanistan from 1979 to 1992, prior to and during the
military intervention by the
USSR in support of the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The mujahideen were also supported by Britain's
MI6, who conducted separate covert actions. The program leaned heavily towards supporting militant Islamic groups, including groups with
jihadist ties, that were favored by the regime of
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring
Pakistan, rather than other, less ideological Afghan resistance groups that had also been fighting the Soviet-oriented
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan administration since before the Soviet intervention.
[1]
Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken.
[2] Funding officially began with $695,000 in mid-1979,
[3] was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987,
[1][4][5] described as the "biggest bequest to any Third World insurgency".
[6] The first CIA-supplied weapons were antique British
Lee–Enfield rifles shipped out in December 1979; by September 1986 the program included U.S.-origin
state of the art weaponry, such as
FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, some 2,300 of which were ultimately shipped into Afghanistan.
[7] Funding continued (albeit reduced) after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahideen continued to battle the forces of President
Mohammad Najibullah's army during the
Afghan Civil War (1989–1992).
[8]
Funding
See also:
Reagan Doctrine
The U.S. offered two packages of economic assistance and military sales to support Pakistan's role in the war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The first six-year assistance package (1981–87) amounted to US$3.2 billion, equally divided between economic assistance and military sales. The U.S. also sold 40
F-16 aircraft to Pakistan during 1983–87 at a cost of $1.2 billion outside the assistance package. The second six-year assistance package (1987–93) amounted to $4.2 billion. Out of this, $2.28 billion were allocated for economic assistance in the form of grants or loan that carried the interest rate of 2–3 per cent. The rest of the allocation ($1.74 billion) was in the form of credit for military purchases.
[56] In total, the combined U.S., Saudi, and Chinese aid to the mujahideen is valued at between $6–12 billion.
[57]
The mujahideen benefited from expanded foreign military support from the
United States,
Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, United Kingdom and other
Muslim nations. Saudi Arabia in particular agreed to match dollar for dollar the money the CIA was sending to the Mujahideen. When Saudi payments were late, Wilson and Avrakotos would fly to Saudi Arabia to persuade the monarchy to fulfil its commitments.
[58]
Levels of support to the various Afghan factions varied. The ISI tended to favor vigorous Islamists like Hekmatyar's
Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin and Haqqani. Some Americans agreed.
[58][59] However, others favored the relative moderates like
Ahmed Shah Massoud. These included two
Heritage Foundation foreign policy analysts,
Michael Johns and James A. Phillips, both of whom championed Massoud as the Afghan resistance leader most worthy of US support under the Reagan Doctrine.
[60][61][62]
