Iraq DID have a stockpile of biological and chemical weapons at one point...

[FleetwoodMac]

... courtesy of The Gipper.

Reagan, who initially authorized weapon sales to both the Iraqis and Iranians during Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), decided to side with Saddam Hussein after a couple of years. In 1982, Iraq was removed from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, and Donald Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad not long after - the first of his many trips there - for reasons that remain unclear to this day.

Acting under the instruction of the Reagan administration*, the DoD and DoC approved the delivery of 70 shipments of biological/chemical agents to Iraq between 1985-1989, under 771 separate export licenses covering at least fourteen types of chemical and biological agents, including the deadly nerve agents sarin, anthrax, and somain.

* "In June, 1982, President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran. President Reagan decided that the United States would do whatever was necessary and legal to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran. President Reagan formalized this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive ("NSDD&quot to this effect in June, 1982. I have personal knowledge of this NSDD because I co-authored the NSDD with another NSC Staff Member, Geoff Kemp. The NSDD, including even its indentifying number, is classified." - Howard Teicher

Saddam's use of these biological and chemical weapons, delivered chiefly via missiles, was well documented. Iranian soldiers became his first victims, before Saddam turned his attention to the Kurd separatists and Shia' rebels in Iraq. The United States subsequently vetoed (1986-89) all UN Security Council resolutions which condemned Saddam's use of these weapons.

This decision would come to haunt the country several years later when an estimated 100,000 American soldiers were exposed to these weapons, by varying degrees, during the Gulf War.

In 1991, UNSCOM director Rolf Ekeus, tasked with dismantling and eliminating Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear stockpile, told the U.N Security Council of the discovery of chemical warheads armed with nerve gas. Meanwhile, CIA Director William Webster estimated that Iraq possess 1,000 tons of poisonous chemical agents, fully capable of being loaded unto missiles.

By 1993, a succession of UN teams destroyed at least "13,000 155-mm artillery shells loaded with mustard gas; 6,200 rockets loaded with nerve agent; 800 nerve agent aerial bombs; 28 SCUD warheads loaded with Sarin; 75 tons of the nerve agent Sarin; 60-70 tons of the nerve agent Tabun; and, 250 tons of mustard gas and stocks of thiodiglycol, a precursor chemical for mustard gas," along with several plants used to manufacture these agents.

By 1994, for all intents and purposes, the Iraqi WMD program was effectively over, along with its legacy biological and chemical weapon programs. Within several years, the country's entire infrastructure was tethering on the brink of collapse; the economy was in shambles, the military in tatters, the population living in fear from regular coalition bombings (and Saddam's own reign of terror). Iraq was broken.

And then, PNAC and the neocons came along...

Sources:
The Teicher Affidavit
Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses
The Riegle Report
How Iraq built its weapons programs
Arming Iraq: A Chronology of U.S. Involvement
Iran Contra Affair
Arafat Eases Stand on Kuwait-Palestine Link

Trivia: In 1992, after the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of force to oust Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, a surprised Saddam offered to withdraw. There are reports that he was initially operating under the assumption that the U.S. would look away at a Kuwaiti invasion. As a face saving gesture, Saddam offered to withdraw from Kuwait subject to the UN Security Council agreeing "to address the plight of Palestinians as a condition for settling the Persian Gulf crisis." His offer was rejected, and there rest, as they say, is history.

Edit: The links are not appearing.

http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/collections/hidden/teicher.htm
http://www.va.gov/RAC-GWVI/docs/Committee_Documents/ReportandRecommendations_ScientificProgressinUnderstandingGWVI_2004.pdf
http://www.gulfweb.org/bigdoc/report/riegle1.html
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/03/16/news_pf/Perspective/How_Iraq_built_its_we.shtml
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/arming_iraq.php
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/03/world/confrontation-in-the-gulf-arafat-eases-stand-on-kuwait-palestine-link.html

[deminks]

1. 1983 Rummy and Saddam picture

a known known.



Never shake hands with a war criminal.

[FleetwoodMac]

5. Do two war criminals cancel each other out?

Great pic.

[progree]

2. RW: "Saddam gassed his own people, he gassed his own people - Halabja Halabja Halabja"

I don't know how many times I've heard that from right-wing sources as justification for the invasion of Iraq. The gassing of the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja was in March 1988.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_poison_gas_attack#International_sources_for_technology_and_chemical_precursors

But the U.S. government didn't seem to be so upset at the time -- the next year they extended agricultural credits to Saddam's regime.

http://axisofevelknievel.blogspot.com/2007/03/march-16.html

By the end of the 1990s, Halabja was rarely mentioned in the American press and almost never by political leaders like Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. By the summer of 2002, however, Bush administration officials had developed a certain fondness for the town’s name, invoking it as often as possible as the United State prepared for yet another war against Saddam Hussein. Three days before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, George W. Bush spoke in his radio address about the anniversary of the Halabja massacre:

"Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending from the sky. Many who managed to survive still suffer from cancer, blindness, respiratory diseases, miscarriages, and severe birth defects among their children."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/30988264/An-Inconvenient-Atrocity-The-Chemical-Weapons-Attack-on-the-Kurds-of-Halabja-Iraq
U.S. Government Reaction

Reagan administration officials responded to the attacks on Halabja by rhetorically condemning the use of chemical weapons but failing to back their words with action. In fact, not only did the administration fail to penalize Iraq for chemical weapons use on civilians, it actively blocked efforts by others to hold Saddam Hussein and his regime accountable. The administration blamed Iran as well as Iraq for the attacks on Halabja, without ever producing evidence of Iranian involvement, a strategy that diffused international outrage; it tried (unsuccessfully) to prevent the UN from investigating the Halabja attacks; and it successfully stopped a tough Congressional bill—that would have hit Iraq with harsh sanctions for chemical weapons use—from becoming law. The administration put economic and energy-related interests above human rights when formulating official policy on Iraq, and evidence of these priorities appears frequently in memos and cables.The U.S. government, however, was not in lock step concerning Iraq and chemical weapons use. Some members of Congress argued passionately on the floor of the Senate and House to penalize Baghdad; the State Department was not unanimous in its objective to maintain good relations with Iraq, putting Secretary of State George Shultz in the position of having to decide which of his staffers’ policy positions to approve.

For one example of differing views regarding Iraqi policy among State Department staffers, in this case whether to extend Export-Import Bank credits, see Action Memorandum, “Export-Import Financing for Iraq,” Alan P. Larson, Richard W. Murphy, and Richard Schifter to George P. Shultz, 29 December 1988, Digital National Security Archive, document no. IG00739. The Digital National Security Archive

[FleetwoodMac]

4. I remember.

The irony here is so thick.

[dipsydoodle]

3. Aside from what the US supplied - just

Rumours........................Fleetwood Mac.

[FleetwoodMac]

6. I see what you did there...