America Didn't Seem to Mind Poison Gas

[RBHam]

America Didn't Seem to Mind Poison Gas
By Joost R. Hiltermann - who is preparing a book on U.S. policy toward Iraq, with partial support from the Open Society Institute and the MacArthur Foundation.
International Herald Tribune, January 17, 2003
http://www.arabmediawatch.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=101

Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center.

This was at a time when Iraq was launching what proved to be the final battles of the war against Iran. Its wholesale use of poison gas against Iranian troops and Iranian Kurdish towns, and its threat to place chemical warheads on the missiles it was lobbing at Tehran, brought Iran to its knees.

Iraq had also just embarked on a counterinsurgency campaign, called the Anfal, against its rebellious Kurds. In this effort, too, the regime's resort to chemical weapons gave it a decisive edge, enabling the systematic killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children.

The deliberate American prevarication on Halabja was the logical, although probably undesired, outcome of a pronounced six-year tilt toward Iraq, seen as a bulwark against the perceived threat posed by Iran's zealous brand of politicized Islam. The United States began the tilt after Iraq, the aggressor in the war, was expelled from Iranian territory by a resurgent Iran, which then decided to pursue its own, fruitless version of regime change in Baghdad. There was little love for what virtually all of Washington recognized as an unsavory regime, but Iraq was considered the lesser evil. Sealed by National Security Decision Directive 114 in 1983, the tilt included billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Iraq.

Iraq and Poison Gas
by Dilip Hiro
August 28, 2002
http://www.arabmediawatch.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=104

excerpt:
The US has always known about Baghdad's deployment of chemical weapons and their use against his own people, especially during the Iran-Iraq War. “What did the US government do about it then? Nothing,” reports The Nation, “until ‘gassing his own people’ became a catchy slogan to demonize Saddam.”

It is suddenly de rigueur for US officials to say, "Saddam Hussein gassed his own people." They are evidently referring to the Iraqi military's use of chemical weapons in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War, and then in the area controlled by the Teheran-backed Kurdish insurgents after the cease-fire in August.

Since Baghdad's deployment of chemical arms in war as well as peace was known at the time, the question is: What did the US government do about it then? Nothing. Worse, so strong was the hold of the pro-Iraq lobby on the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan, it succeeded in getting the White House to frustrate the Senate's attempt to penalize Baghdad for violating the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons, which it had signed. This led Saddam to believe that Washington was firmly on his side--a conclusion that paved the way for his invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf War, the full consequences of which have yet to play themselves out.

[EVDebs]

1. Some say it was Iranian cyanide-based gas...not Saddam at all

[RBHam]

3. That was the original lie - to cover for Saddam

"Some say" was the West Point Army College - the Iranians were the enemy then. Saddam was our pal.

[slaveplanet]

4. Lie?

do tell ..and why would he still be lying to this day...when the lie hurts the adminstration...

STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE...http://tinyurl.com/6mljb
This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.


The real target of Iran was the Darbandikhan dam ...
I could see Saddam going chemical to save that...


We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.

Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.

Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades — not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.

He finishes up with...

Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards

[EVDebs]

5. Article from NY Review of Books

IRAQ'S CHEMICAL WARFARE
By Douglas V. Johnson, Stephen C. Pelletiere, Reply by Edward Mortimer
In response to The Thief of Baghdad (September 27, 1990)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3441

Seems like enough doubt to go around for everyone...

[Terran1212]

2. Millions of Vietnamese still suffering from Agent Orange

US refuses to pay reparations.

US has little problem with poison gas.