FRIENDS AND FOES

The government of the United States handpicks its friends and enemies.
The American taxpayers foot the bill.
Both political parties are guilty.
President Reagan secretly aided Iran by selling weapons to that country in order to fund the Contras.
The C.I.A. handpicked Saddam Hussein:

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

The U.S. shut a blind eye when Hussein used chemical weapons (made from some materials that came from the United States):

How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them
The Sunday Herald
September 8, 2002
By Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot

THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs which oversees American exports policy reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.

The chessmen are moved when the U.S. government needs to keep a friend or destroy an enemy.
The Taliban were ignored until they backed off from supporting the construction of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan.
The poppies didn't bloom so abundantly in Afghanistan as they do now.
The Taliban wouldn’t allow them to bloom.
But now the Taliban gets money from those same poppies.
Drug dealer Noriega was a friend until Bush Senior sent him packing.
Then there was Somoza.
Then there was Pinochet.
Then there was Marcos.
There was George W. Bush.