The United States' less than savory involvement with Iraq began after World War II, when our government stepped into the colonial shoes of Britain and took up the same tactics of political intrigue and clandestine force to assure access to the country's vast oil reserves on the West's terms and to offset Soviet influence in the region. Ever since we insinuated ourselves into what Allen Dulles called "the most dangerous spot on earth," the U.S. has cared about one thing only, "stability" -- which Washington has invariably defined not as a just and democratic government, but as a dictatorship amenable to our interests, no matter how brutal to its own people. The U.S. never resorted to the most extreme British tactics, as in 1920 when the English used its air force and gas warfare against civilians to crush a popular uprising against the British-installed monarchy (foreshadowing Saddam's ruthlessness against his own people). But, like Britain, Washington was not above orchestrating bloody coups aimed at eliminating leaders with nationalistic or Communist leanings.

In fact, it was one such coup -- the 1963 revolt that toppled Abdel Karim Kassem -- that first brought an ambitious young Ba'ath Party enforcer named Saddam Hussein to America's attention. Saddam, who was in exile in Cairo at the time, offered his services to the CIA, since the Ba'athists and the U.S. had a mutual enemy in Kassem, with his Communist sympathies. After Kassem was overthrown and executed, Saddam and the CIA again teamed up, according to his biographer Said K. Aburish, to compile lists of Iraqi political enemies for elimination. "The primary source" for the names on the list, according to Aburish, was "William McHale, a CIA agent operating under the cover of a Time magazine correspondent and the brother of Don McHale, then a senior officer in Washington ... But McHale, though he provided the longest list, was not alone, and a senior Egyptian intelligence officer, Christian Ba'athists in Lebanon, Saddam's small group in Cairo and other individuals and groups contributed to this shameful exercise. As often happens on such occasions, some people were killed as a result of personal vendettas.

"Many were disposed of on an individual basis -- a knock on the door followed by a hail of bullets; others died under torture or in groups of up to 30 at a time. After considerable research I have compiled a list of over 800 names, but the real figure is undoubtedly considerably higher. Those killed included people who represented the backbone of Iraqi society -- lawyers, doctors, academics and students -- as well as workers, women and children."

With the Ba'athists now part of the new government, Saddam was given the job of fortifying its security, roaming the country in search of enemies and personally torturing some of them in the aptly named "Palace of the End" from which no one returned. It was during this period that Saddam began openly using the maxims of his hero, Stalin, particularly this stirring one: "If there is a person then there is a problem; if there is no person then there is no problem."

When the Ba'athists were forced out of the government the following year, Saddam again had to flee. But by 1967, he and his fellow party leaders were once more conspiring with the CIA to overthrow the government of Abdel Salam Aref, who had attracted the enmity of the U.S. and Britain by inviting the Soviets to develop the vast North Rumeillah oil field. One American plotter, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, was so blatant in his efforts that Iraqi demonstrators took to the streets in Baghdad shouting, "Go back home, Anderson!" Saddam and his fellow conspirators recruited support from a group of Iraqi military officers and in 1968 they took power. By 1970 Saddam himself was in complete control of the country. Since then he has perfected the cruel science of terror and torture, with his own people the chief victims. As Aburish observes, he "adopted the ways of Joseph Stalin and merged them with his tribal instincts ... a synthesis of Bedouin guile and Communist method." But as the 1970s and '80s passed, no U.S. administration moved to restrain the beast of Baghdad. He was, and remained, a creature of Washington and its Mideast policy.

The Iraq doomsday arsenal that inflames Washington hawks today was built with U.S. and Western assistance during the Reagan-Bush years, when Saddam was viewed as a bludgeon against our enemy, the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime. A U.S. company, American Type Culture Collection, shipped Baghdad strains of toxins and bacteria while Washington looked the other way. Saddam found other companies in the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and elsewhere willing to help supply his nuclear bomb program. "In all of this, we were just taking advantage of the West's 'don't ask, just sell' attitude toward Iraq," writes Khidir Hamza, the exiled Iraqi nuclear scientist whose memoir "Saddam's Bombmaker" is a deeply disturbing account of life inside the Saddam death culture.

During his war with Iran, Saddam began using his grotesque biochemical devices on his own people. According to Hamza, who calls this "one of the most grisly episodes of these awful weapons in history," Saddam began not with the Kurds, but with the Shiites -- the majority population he suspected of being fifth columnists during the war. He injected Shiites as they were released from prison with an anthrax-like toxin and then began experimenting with chemical agents on Shiite prisoners at a German-built "pesticide" factory. He then turned his infamous cousin, known as Ali Chemical, on the Kurds, whom Saddam also accused of being "back-stabbers" during the war. He began by dumping typhoid spores into Kurdish villagers' water supplies. Then, in late 1987, he targeted villages in the Balasan Valley for gas attacks. By March 1988, Ali Chemical was ready for his most dramatic massacre, a nerve-agent assault on the village of Halabjah, a name that Hamza notes "would join Guernica, My Lai and Srbrenica in the pantheon of history's infamous war crimes."

It is Halabjah that President Bush refers to when he reviles Saddam for "gassing his own people." But at the time, his father, then vice president and on his way to being elected president, made no similar expressions of outrage, nor did anyone in the Reagan administration, which cynically tried to put the blame for the gas attacks on Iran. "The world greeted the gruesome news with a deafening silence," Hamza writes. "Saddam was the West's dog in the fight against Iran."

When Bush senior moved into the White House, he continued to support Saddam, ignoring his barbaric human rights violations and repelling congressional efforts to impose sanctions on his regime. One Bush envoy to Baghad went as far as to describe the tyrant as "a force of moderation." During Bush's first year in office, writes Aburish, "the United States continued to supply Iraq with helicopter engines, vacuum pumps for a nuclear plant, sophisticated communications equipment, computers, bacteria strains and hundreds of tons of unrefined Sarin." Aburish also notes that an influential pro-Iraq business lobby group at the time employed the consulting services of Henry Kissinger's firm, including Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, who would soon join the administration.

The first Bush administration's attitude toward Saddam would drastically change, of course, when the dictator, in a monumental miscalculation, decided to invade Kuwait -- a misstep he would later blame on Bush ambassador April Glaspie, whom he was convinced had given him a green light to attack. Gassing his people was one thing, but threatening the West's oil supplies was quite another. Instead of a force for moderation, now Saddam was the new Hitler. Nonetheless, he was left in power after his military was crushed in the Gulf War. After calling on the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam, Bush left the brave Kurds and Shiites who responded to the mercies of the dictator -- a stunning betrayal dramatized in the 1999 film "Three Kings." Bush reportedly bowed to the wishes of his Saudi royal friends, who feared that a pro-Iran Shiite-led democracy might emerge from the ashes of Saddam's regime.

During the Clinton years, some old Bush hands would urge the Democratic administration to do what they had failed to, perhaps out of a nagging sense of guilt, and destroy Saddam. But by then, with the Gulf War coalition coming undone, it was no simple task. And for some Bush administration veterans, commerce was again a higher priority than anti-Saddam vigilance. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Dick Cheney told ABC News that as the head of the oil industry supply firm Halliburton, he had a strict policy against doing any business with Iraq -- "even arrangements that were supposedly legal." And yet, as the Financial Times would later uncover, Cheney's company actually did over $23 million worth of business with Saddam's government in 1998 and '99. As Salon's Damien Cave observed, Cheney, who made $36 million in salary at Halliburton before being elected vice president, ended up profiting from rebuilding what he had helped destroy as secretary of defense during the Gulf War.

All this history is by way of explaining why when the current President Bush puts on his best West Texas sheriff's voice and vows that Saddam "will see" what he has coming, as if the Iraqi dictator had just ridden into town looking for trouble instead of being escorted in by the U.S. cavalry, the rest of the world regards it as disingenuous. At this point, not one nation in the world, with the sole exception of Kuwait (for obvious reasons), supports a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even Tony Blair has cautioned against it. Russia's Vladimir Putin, in whom Bush has invested so much foreign policy capital, has been particularly outspoken against it, as have the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, whose cooperation would be essential for such a military action.

The United States' unsavory history with Iraq, and our allies' opposition to an invasion, still should not deter us from bringing down Saddam if he can be proved to be the menace to American security and world peace that administration hawks contend he is. (Since the West established a no-fly zone in north and south Iraq, he is no longer the tormentor of his own Kurdish and Shiite people that he once was.) But so far, despite months of talk-show and Op-Ed lobbying by White House proxies like Richard Perle, James Woolsey and Laurie Mylroie, the Bush hard-liners have yet to make their case that Saddam represents a clear and present danger. Polls show that a majority of Americans, still riding on the euphoria of a relatively easy victory in Afghanistan, would back a strike against Saddam. But this support may prove feeble in the actual event of a war -- and in any case not even Pentagon hawk Paul Wolfowitz seriously believes that America can go it alone against Iraq, no matter what they're making Colin Powell say in public. So our allies still need to be persuaded.

The case might be there. I for one am still willing to be convinced. But the media needs to push the White House to lay out its argument in detail, because administration officials can't depend on Tony Blair to do it for them this time. Bush needs to be told that the evildoer rhetoric no longer suffices. The media needs to stop flapping their electronic flag logos for a moment and ask some tough questions. Let's start with these:

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