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Roger Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the NSC staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, says the CIA had a hand in two coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.
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However "bloody" the coup was it was not within 7 orders of magnitude of the blood spilled by communists in the 20th century. The US purpose wasn't to set saddam on the path to power, but rather this was one skirmish in the worldwide battle against the soviets.
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Morris says that in 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem.
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That's exactly correct - and within the context of the cold war, exactly what should have been done.