Dissenting historian Mark Curtis reveals how the British provided assistance in the Ba’ath party’s seizure of power in Iraq in 1963. Furthermore, “the February 1963 coup was masterminded by the CIA, which provided the coup leaders with a list of 5,000 people who were hunted down and murdered. Ostensibly directed at eliminating the Iraqi Communist Party, they included senior army officers as well as lawyers, professors, teachers and doctors, who were killed mostly in house-to-house visits by hit squads.”
How does this evidence fit with the thinking of the neo-conservatives such as William Kristol? Long arguing that America should be a “benevolent hegemony“, Kristol was one of the leading brains behind the Iraq invasion. He is still paraded on Australian TV as an authoritative voice of the Right, despite the fact that he received money from disgraced multinational Enron and never disclosed the payments. Does our national broadcaster not think it’s appropriate to acknowledge this fact? Kristol is the kind of Republican who prefers preaching American-directed democracy to the Arab world and ignoring hypocrisies closer to home.