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Originally Posted by nexxo
As a point of interest, did you know Saddam used weapons sold to him by the US to do that? US Shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam 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.
Make no mistake. For a decade we nurtured the monster that we later felt forced to slay, and his victims will still remember who fed him.
Let's see what else we sold him:
The U.S. was officially neutral regarding the Iran-Iraq war, and claimed that it armed neither side. Iran depended on U.S.-origin weapons, however, and sought them from Israel, Europe, Asia, and South America. Iraq started the war with a large Soviet-supplied arsenal, but needed additional weaponry as the conflict wore on.
By mid-1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. Having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its interests, the US began supporting Iraq: measures already underway to upgrade U.S.-Iraq relations were accelerated, and in February 1982 the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. (It had been included several years earlier because of ties with several Palestinian nationalist groups, not Islamicists sharing the worldview of Al-Qaeda.)
But it was Donald Rumsfeld's trip to Baghdad which opened of the floodgates during 1985-90 for lucrative U.S. weapons exports--some $1.5 billion worth-- including chemical/biological and nuclear weapons equipment and technology, along with critical components for missile delivery systems for all of the above. Some 771 weapons export licenses for Iraq were approved during this six year period by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Iraq received massive external financial support from the Gulf states, and assistance through loan programs from the U.S. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing and enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The U.S. restored formal relations with Iraq in November 1984, but the U.S. had begun, several years earlier, to provide it with intelligence and military support (in secret and contrary to this country's official neutrality) in accordance with policy directives from President Ronald Reagan.
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 Sr, 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.
Classified US Defense Department documents show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's reports on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports. The reports show, for example, that on May 2, 1986, two batches of bacillus anthracis -- the micro-organism that causes anthrax -- were shipped to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education, along with two batches of the bacterium clostridium botulinum, the agent that causes deadly botulism poisoning.
One batch each of salmonella and E coli were shipped to the Iraqi State Company for Drug Industries on August 31, 1987. Other shipments went from the US to the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission on July 11, 1988; the Department of Biology at the University of Basrah in November 1989; the Department of Microbiology at Baghdad University in June 1985; the Ministry of Health in April 1985 and Officers' City, a military complex in Baghdad, in March and April 1986.
Iraq has deployed Israeli-developed, sold-to-China, then sold-to-Iraq PL-8 missiles in the no-fly zones. A Chilean arms manufacturer sold Saddam deadly cluster bombs--reportedly with technical assistance from U.S. companies, The US allowed Sarkis to sell Hughes and Bell helicopters. The U.S. government approved the sale after Iraq promised that they would only be used for civilian purposes, but the helicopters were used as transportation during Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Same with US-sold military trucks. Eighteen American corporations provided Saudi Arabia with military hardware which included TOW missiles. The Saudis then delivered MK-84 2,000 pound bombs to Iraq in violation of the Arms Export Control Act. And former US officials report that both Israel and the Dutch company Delft made unauthorized sales of US thermal-imaging tank sights to, among others, China. The sights were installed on China's 69 MOD-2 tanks, some of which were sold to Iraq. It's a small world after all...
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