Bob had a great talk (Scott’s on assignment) with Professor Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt of Cal State-Stanislaus, author of “The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq” about Iraqi history from the Ottoman Empire to the present, with an emphasis on the period from 1958 to the 1970s.
Listen in: https://apple.co/3dmOwpu
Before Iraq became the target of a massive U.S. intervention, it was a British colony, and then a kingdom, which achieved sovereignty in a 1958 revolution led by Karim Kasim. However, the U.S., especially President John Kennedy, began to oppose the Kasim regime and helped engineer a 1963 coup against him and then sending support to the new regime to isolate and kill Kasim backers and others, especially communists.
We talked about the role of Nasserism in Iraq, the importance of the Communist Party, the politics of oil, the perhaps surprising opposition of American oil companies to the U.S.-backed coups d’etat, and the policies of JFK and LBJ.
The country the U.S. attacked and devastated in two wars in the 1990s and early 2000s was the product of long-term American interference and meddling.
