COVER STORY: How the US armed Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons
One of the more comprehensive and damning accounts of Iraqgate was written by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas and published in the February 23, 1992, Los Angeles Times. Headlined, ?Bush secret effort helped Iraq build its war machine?, the article reported that ?classified documents obtained by the LA Times show ? a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by [George Bush senior] ? both as president and vice president ? to support and placate the Iraqi dictator.?
Even William Safire, the right-wing, war-mongering NYT columnist, on December 7, 1992, felt compelled to write that, ?Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [the US, Britain and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator?.
At first, as Iraqi forces seemed headed for victory over Iran, official US policy was neutrality in the conflict. Not only was Hussein doing Washington's dirty work in the war with Iran, but the US rulers believed that Iraq could be lured away from its close economic and military relationship with the Soviet Union ? just as Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had done in the 1970s.
In March 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig excitedly told the Senate foreign relations committee that Iraq was concerned by ?the behaviour of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern region?. The Soviet government had refused to deliver arms to Iraq as long as Baghdad continued its military offensive against Iran. Moscow was also unhappy with the Hussein's vicious repression of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Using its allies in the Middle East, Washington funnelled huge supplies of arms to Iraq. Classified State Department cables uncovered by Frantz and Waas described covert transfers of howitzers, helicopters, bombs and other weapons to Baghdad in 1982-83 from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.
Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the US National Security Council during the Reagan administration, told the February 23, 1992, LA Times: ?There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship US arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact. It was a policy of nods and winks.?
According to Mark Phythian's 1997 book Arming Iraq: How the US and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine (Northeastern University Press), in 1983 Reagan asked Italy's Prime Minister Guilo Andreotti to channel arms to Iraq.
The January 1, 1984 Washington Post reported that the US had ?informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be ?contrary to US interests' and has made several moves to prevent that result?.
There is no doubt that the US government knew Iraq was using chemical weapons. On March 5, 1984, the State Department had stated that ?available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons?. The March 30, 1984, NYT reported that US intelligence officials has ?what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites for mass producing the lethal chemical warfare agent?.
However, consistent with the pattern throughout the Iran-Iraq war and after, the use of these internationally outlawed weapons was not considered important enough by Rumsfeld and his political superiors to halt Washington's blossoming love affair with Hussein.
Conventional military sales resumed in December 1982. In 1983, the Reagan administration approved the sale of 60 Hughes helicopters to Iraq in 1983 ?for civilian use?. However, as Phythian pointed out, these aircraft could be ?weaponised? within hours of delivery. Then US Secretary of State George Schultz and commerce secretary George Baldridge also lobbied for the delivery of Bell helicopters equipped for ?crop spraying?. It is believed that US-supplied choppers were used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5000 people.
With the Reagan administration's connivance, Baghdad immediately embarked on a massive militarisation drive. This US-endorsed military spending spree began even before Iraq was delisted as a terrorist state, when the US commerce department approved the sale of Italian gas turbine engines for Iraq's naval frigates.
Soon after, the US agriculture department's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) guaranteed to repay loans ? in the event of defaults by Baghdad ? banks had made to Iraq to buy US-grown commodities such as wheat and rice. Under this scheme, Iraq had three years to repay the loans, and if it could not the US taxpayers would have to cough up.
Washington offered this aid initially to prevent Hussein's overthrow as the Iraqi people began to complain about the food shortages caused by the massive diversion of hard currency for the purchase of weapons and ammunition. The loan guarantees amounted to a massive US subsidy that allowed Hussein to launch his overt and covert arms buildup, one result being that the Iran-Iraq war entered a bloody five-year stalemate.
By the end of 1983, US$402 million in agriculture department loan guarantees for Iraq were approved. In 1984, this increased to $503 million and reached $1.1 billion in 1988. Between 1983 and 1990, CCC loan guarantees freed up more than $5 billion. Some $2 billion in bad loans, plus interest, ended up having to be covered by US taxpayers.
A similar taxpayer-funded, though smaller scale, scam operated under the auspices of the federal Export-Import Bank. In 1984, vice-president George Bush senior personally intervened to ensure that the bank guaranteed loans to Iraq of $500 million to build an oil pipeline. Export-Import Bank loan guarantees grew from $35 million in 1985 to $267 million by 1990.
According to William Blum, writing in the August 1998 issue of the Progressive, Sam Gejdenson, chairperson of a Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, disclosed that from 1985 until 1990 ?the US government approved 771 licenses [only 39 were rejected] for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application ?
?The US spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted? US export control policy was directed by US foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was US foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein.?
A 1994 US Senate report revealed that US companies were licenced by the commerce department to export a ?witch's brew? of biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis (which causes anthrax) and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism). The American Type Culture Collection made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.
The report also noted that US exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare facilities and chemical warhead filling equipment. US firms supplied advanced and specialised computers, lasers, testing and analysing equipment. Among the better-known companies were Hewlett Packard, Unisys, Data General and Honeywell.
Billions of dollars worth of raw materials, machinery and equipment, missile technology and other ?dual-use? items were also supplied by West German, French, Italian, British, Swiss and Austrian corporations, with the approval of their governments (German firms even sold Iraq entire factories capable of mass-producing poison gas). Much of this was purchased with funds freed by the US CCC credits.
On March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. While that attack is today being touted by senior US officials as one of the main reasons why Hussein must now be ?taken out?, at the time Washington's response to the atrocity was much more relaxed.
Just four months later, Washington stood by as the US giant Bechtel corporation won the contract to build a huge petrochemical plant that would give the Hussein regime the capacity to generate chemical weapons.
On September 8, 1988, the US Senate passed the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime. Immediately, the Reagan administration announced its opposition to the bill, calling it ?premature?. The White House used its influence to stall the bill in the House of Representatives. When Congress did eventually pass the bill, the White House did not implement it.
Washington's political, military and economic sweetheart deals with the Iraqi dictator came under even more stress when, in August 1989, FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Rome-based Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) and uncovered massive fraud involving the CCC loan guarantee scheme and billions of dollars worth of unauthorised ?off-the-books? loans to Iraq.
BNL Atlanta manager Chris Drougal had used the CCC program to underwrite programs that had nothing to do with agricultural exports. Using this covert set-up, Hussein's regime tried to buy the most hard-to-get components for its nuclear weapons and missile programs on the black market.
Russ Baker, writing in the March/April 1993 Columbia Journalism Review, noted: ?Elements of the US government almost certainly knew that Drougal was funnelling US-backed loans ? into dual-use technology and outright military technology. The British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix-Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the centre of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta... It would be later alleged by bank executives that the Italian government, long a close US ally as well as BNL's ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions.?
Yet, even the public outrage generated by the Halabja massacre and the widening BNL scandal did not cool Washington's ardour towards Hussein's Iraq.
In November 1989, Bush senior approved $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq in 1990. In April 1990, more revelations about the BNL scandal had again pushed the department of agriculture to the verge of halting Iraq's CCC loan guarantees. On May 18, national security adviser Scowcroft personally intervened to ensure the delivery of the first $500 million tranche of the CCC subsidy for 1990.
According to Frantz and Waas' February 23, 1992, LA Times article, in July 1990 ?officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second installment of the $1 billion in loan guarantees, despite the looming crisis in the region and evidence that Iraq had used the aid illegally to help finance a secret arms procurement network to obtain technology for its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program?.
From July 18 to August 1, 1990, Bush senior's administration approved $4.8 million in advanced technology sales to Iraq. The end-users included Saad 16 and the Iraqi ministry of industry and military industrialisation. On August 1, $695,000 worth of advanced data transmission devices were approved.
?Only on August 2, 1990, did the agriculture department officially suspend the [CCC loan] guarantees to Iraq ? the same day that Hussein's tanks and troops swept into Kuwait?, noted Frantz and Waas.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2002/506/506p12.htm
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