The Hussein and Bin Laden Myth

One liberal myth that is often repeated is that the United States is responsible for both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It is part of a pattern with the blame-America-firsters that every evil in the world is America's fault. Even in those cases in which the U.S. appears to be the victim, liberals imply that America is getting what it deserves. The liberal point is the U.S. should not fight its enemies around the world because it created them in the first place, as if the threat can safely be ignored if only Americans become more self-righteous. I should note that sometimes isolationists make similar arguments.

I recall that the left tried to blame Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on the U.S., for example, just because he had once been a CIA informant, ignoring the fact that he had been associated with the anti-American regime that extorted the Panama Canal from the U.S. under Jimmy Carter.

A brief history of Hussein and bin Laden dispels the myth that the U.S. is responsible for them. Saddam Hussein rose to power with the Baath Socialist Party in 1969 as the powerful and feared vice president of Iraq, becoming president a decade later. The Baathists were anti-American. Indeed, Baathist Iraq was a Soviet client state, which is why most of its weapons were Soviet-made or French-made (as France was its former colonial master), not American-made. The Reagan Administration did provide a limited amount of intelligence and military aid to Hussein in the late 1980s in order to prevent Iran, America's mortal enemy, from winning its war with Iraq. Reagan succeeded in ending that long, bloody war, which was disrupting the shipment of oil in the Persian Gulf, without either side winning. It is important to note that, at the time, Hussein had stopped actively sponsoring terrorism and toned down his anti-American rhetoric. There was the hope that Iraq would turn out similar to Egypt, which had left the Soviet orbit and become an American client state under Anwar Sadat. But the hope was dashed just two years later when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Hussein reverted to his anti-American rhetoric and sponsorship of terrorism. In short, Hussein's
rise to power was in spite of the U.S., and not because of it. The only support the U.S. gave him was not out of fondness but out of expedience, as the old Arab saying goes: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

The myth about bin Laden arises because he rose to prominence during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan while the U.S. aided the Mujaheddin, the Muslim holy warriors, whom the Saudi bin Laden was also aiding. The assumption is that because the U.S. was aiding the Mujaheddin and so was bin Laden simultaneously, therefore, the U.S. must have aided bin Laden. But the U.S. did not aid all of the Mujaheddin; it provided no aid to bin Laden's warriors. Bin Laden was so anti-American that he would never have accepted U.S. aid if it had been offered. Indeed, it has been said that he would have killed any American with whom he came into contact even then, which is why he considered the mere presence of American troops in some other part of Saudi Arabia as a desecration of the holy sites of Islam. He provided funding for his warriors on his own. Therefore, the U.S. did not "create" bin Laden.

The left refuses to accept that there are evil people in the world, but because they have no trouble believing that we conservatives are evil, any evil people in the world they believe must be the creation of conservativism. But the U.S. is not the root of most evil in the world. It has been one of the greatest forces for good in history, which is why it is worth defending, no matter why our enemies exist.