Reply #4: "Ronnie & Saddam"

[TahitiNut]

It was just before Christmas 1983 that Donald Rumsfeld, then US presidential envoy to Iraq, slipped quietly into Baghdad to come face to face with the man who would become one of America’s greatest enemies within two decades.

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While America was selling WMD to Iraq, Reagan was also telling Saddam to increase his brutal campaign against the Iranian fundamentalist regime, even while Iraqi poison gas was falling on Persian battlefields. The Reagan presidency made America complicit in Saddam’s war crimes.

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In 1982, as the Iran-Iraq war began to hot up, the USA quietly took Iraq off the State Department’s list of states that supported terrorism. This allowed money to start flowing from America into Saddam’s coffers.

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America was fully aware of Saddam’s war crimes. A November 1983 US memorandum from the bureau of politico-military affairs to the then secretary of state George Shultz, headed Iraqi Use Of Chemical Weapons, confirms that America knew that Saddam was using chemical weapons on an “almost daily basis”. Another State Department memo, also written in November 1983 – this time from the office of the assistant secretary for near Eastern and South Asian affairs – says the US should tell Saddam that America knows about the use of poison gas, as that would “avoid unpleasantly surprising Iraq through public positions we may have to take on this issue”. However, State Department documents also reveal that America decided to limit its “efforts against the Iraqi CW programme to close monitoring because of our strict neutrality”.

Other State Department cables sent around this time show that America knew Iraq used chemical weapons in October 1982 and in July and August 1983, “and more recently against Kurdish insurgents”. Reagan also knew by the end of 1983 that “with the essential assistance of foreign firms, Iraq has become able to deploy and use CW and probably has built up large reserves of CW for further use”.

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