US intelligence helped Saddam's Ba`ath Party seize power for the first time in 1963. Evidence suggests that Saddam was on the CIA payroll as early as 1959, when he participated in a failed assassination attempt against Iraqi strongman Abd al-Karim Qassem. In the 1980s, the US and Britain backed Saddam in the war against Iran, giving Iraq arms, money, satellite intelligence, and even chemical & bio-weapon precursors. As many as 90 US military advisors supported Iraqi forces and helped pick targets for Iraqi air and missile attacks.

Dr. Thomas H. Henriksen provides us with historical insights of the benefits and difficulties of implementing strategic concepts for Dividing Our Enemies. He suggests that understanding and leveraging the human fault lines to counter terrorism can sometimes be an important complement to, or even substitute for, Special Operations Forces’ direct action tactics and larger battles of annihilation. Overwhelming fire is likely to be much less effective by itself in today’s global fight against violent extremism than other approaches that can take advantage of the political divisions among insurgents and terrorists….

This publication addresses military psychological operations planning and execution in support of joint, multinational, and interagency efforts across the range of military operations.

One of the PNAC's (By Project for the New American Century / Foreign Policy Initiative) most influential publications was a 90-page report titled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century. Citing the PNAC's 1997 Statement of Principles, Rebuilding America's Defenses asserted that the United States should "seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership" by "maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces." The report's primary author was Thomas Donnelly, and Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt are credited as project chairmen. It also lists the names of 27 other participants that contributed papers or attended meetings related to the production of the report, six of whom subsequently assumed key defense and foreign policy positions in the Bush administration. It suggested that the preceding decade had been a time of peace and stability, which had provided "the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth" and "the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy." The report warned that "no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself.