"It was the Carter administration that green-lighted, and later armed and aided, Saddam Hussein's distinctly unilateral invasion of Iran in 1979, an invasion that cost about a million and a half casualties, many of them civilian."
Not to nitpick, but the invasion took place in Sept. 1980, while Carter was in a losing campaign with Reagan. How he "later" armed and aided Saddam while packing his things for Plains is open to discussion. Reagan, on the other hand, did more to help Saddam than anything Carter could imagine; but now that former Reaganites, sponsors of Central American death squads and the like, are bully for "democracy" (weren't they always?), I suppose Hitch can overlook their bloody legacy, from Rumsfeld's handshake with Saddam in '83 to blocking Congressional action after the gassing of the Kurds, and so on.
<http://slate.msn.com/id/2079860>
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