[lit-ideas] Re: Hitchens' Hypothetical Iraq War

  • From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:09:38 -0800

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>


Andreas.

We never gave Saddam WMDs. 

U.S.-Iraqi arms transfers in the war

Donald Rumsfeld meeting Saddam on 19 December - 20 December 1983. Rumsfeld visited again on 24 March 1984; the same day the UN released a report that Iraq had used mustard and Tabun nerve gas against Iranian troops. The NY Times reported from Baghdad on 29 March 1984, that "American diplomats pronounce themselves satisfied with Iraq and the U.S., and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been established in all but name." NSA Archive Source
Western support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war has clearly been established. It is no secret that the United States, the Soviet Union, West Germany, France, many western companies, and Britain provided military support and even components of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction program. The role the United States played in the war against Iran however, although present to some degree, is not as well known.

After the revolution, with the Ayatollahs in power and levels of enmity between Iran and the U.S. running high, early on during the Iran-Iraq war, realpolitikers in Washington came to the conclusion that Saddam was the lesser of the two evils, and hence efforts to support Iraq became the order of the day, both during the long war with Iran and afterward. This led to what later became known as the Iraq-gate scandals.

Much of what Iraq received from the West, however, were not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology- mainframe computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. It is now known that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and elsewhere, fed Iraq's warring capabilities right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait [6].

The Iraq-gate scandal revealed that an Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. In August 1989, when FBI agents finally raided the Atlanta branch of BNL, the branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq-some of which, according to his indictment, were used to purchase arms and weapons technology.

Beginning in September, 1989, the Financial Times laid out the first charges that BNL, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed loans, was funding Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons work. For the next two and a half years, the Financial Times provided the only continuous newspaper reportage (over 300 articles) on the subject. Among the companies shipping militarily useful technology to Iraq under the eye of the U.S. government, according to the Financial Times, were Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, and Matrix Churchill, through its Ohio branch [7].

Even before the Persian Gulf War started in 1990, the Intelligencer Journal of Pennsylvania in a string of articles reported: "If U.S. and Iraqi troops engage in combat in the Persian Gulf, weapons technology developed in Lancaster and indirectly sold to Iraq will probably be used against U.S. forces ... And aiding in this ... technology transfer was the Iraqi-owned, British-based precision tooling firm Matrix Churchill, whose U.S. operations in Ohio were recently linked to a sophisticated Iraqi weapons procurement network." [8]

Aside from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and ABC's Ted Koppel, the Iraq-gate story never picked up much steam, even though The U.S. Congress became involved with the scandal. FAS report

In December 2002, Iraq's 1,200 page Weapons Declaration revealed a list of Western corporations and countries-as well as individuals-that exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades. Many American names were on the list. Alcolac International, for example, a Maryland company, transported thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor, to Iraq. A Tennessee manufacturer contributed large amounts of a chemical used to make sarin, a nerve gas implicated in so-called (Persian) Gulf War Syndrome. A full list of those companies and their involvements in Iraq [9] [10].

On 25 May 1994, The U.S. Senate Banking Committee released a report in which it was stated that pathogenic (meaning disease producing), toxigenic (meaning poisonous) and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq, pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce. It added: These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction. [11]

The report then detailed 70 shipments (including anthrax bacillus) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program. See another list here, and another here.

843 companies has been listed as being involved in the arming of Iraq. [12] Twenty-four U.S. firms exported arms and materials to Baghdad [13].

Donald Riegle, Chairman of the Senate committee that made the report, said, "UN inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licenses issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programs." He added, "the executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control sent Iraq 14 agents "with biological warfare significance," including West Nile virus, according to Riegle's investigators [14] [15].

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