Iraq memory hole

UK campaigner pursues the truth about the era when Saddam really did have weapons of mass destruction


Friend of Deep Blade Journal Geoffrey Holland is a long-time activist in efforts to hold the US responsible for international crimes in the arming of Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. Please see the original Deep Blade posting on Early Day Motion 300.

Geoffrey writes this morning that a new article by Irene Gendzier has appeared in MERIP Middle East Report concerning the all-but-forgotten era when secret US policy helped arm Saddam Hussein by seeing that he was supplied with all of the exotic chemical, biological, and even nuclear components he wanted for his clandestine weapons program.

Gendzier reminds us of times long forgotten in the wake of President Bush's remaking of the ``grave danger'' his Iraq action has supposedly addressed,

On October 27, 1992, the Senate committee heard expert testimony that revealed that ``dozens of United States firms, many holding United States export licenses, contributed directly to Iraq's ballistic missile and nuclear weapons program, let alone its chemical weapons.'' The same hearings revealed that the Commerce Department ``approved at least 220 export licenses for the Iraqi armed forces, major weapons complexes and enterprises identified by the Central Intelligence Agency as diverting technology to weapons programs.'' US officials could have no doubt as to the end users of such exports, since they knew their destination.

Assumed and often articulated in these hearings were the interests at stake in US policy--the role of oil and the value of the Iraqi market for US agribusiness and high--tech defense industries. The pursuit of such interests was at the root of US courting of the regime of Saddam Hussein, irrespective of its record of aggression and domestic repression.

...

The government went to great lengths to ensure that loans were granted, commodities exported, Iraqi interests recognized--and the American public deceived. The US penchant for secrecy and deception about its Iraq policy became readily apparent in the days before and after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Geoffrey's essential point and cause of action in response is as follows:

...in the 1980s the United States supplied Iraq with materials for its biological weapons programme...this breaches the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which the UK signed in 1972 and ratified in 1975.

Please see the full report Geoffrey prepared in October 2004 for a detailed history of his efforts before Parliament in the UK. This document is notable for its trenchant rhetorical analysis and deft neutralization of dismissive official responses.

In total contravention of 2002-3 pre-invasion hype, the final and official report of Bush's hand-picked Iraq Survey Group (ISG) now concurs with what many activists knew before March 2003 -- that Iraq unilaterally ended its programs and destroyed its stockpiles after the 1991 Gulf War.

Rodger Payne summarized the findings of the ISG/CIA report in a fine November 9, 2004 posting:

* Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program.

* Although Saddam clearly assigned a high value to the nuclear progress and talent that had been developed up to the 1991 war, the program ended and the intellectual capital decayed in the succeeding years.

* While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter...

* In practical terms, with the destruction of the Al Hakam facility, Iraq abandoned its ambition to obtain advanced BW [biological] weapons quickly. ISG found no direct evidence that Iraq, after 1996, had plans for a new BW program or was conducting BW-specific work for military purposes. Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the Presidential level.

There you have it. Iraq was no threat to anyone without US support.

It has been an unfortunate triumph of the administration's mendacity in its PR campaign that has made it look like discovery of Saddam's weapons programs, massacres, and mass graves was some new spectre in 2002--an unquestioned causus belli. Today's warbloggers and Republican shills are clueless about how badly Bush has duped them on this one.

In the really forgotten times of September 1988, even then enough news had come out about Saddam's atrocities that no less than the United States Senate unanimously passed The Prevention of Genocide Act, a set of comprehensive sanctions against Saddam. But how did Saddam's supporters in the Reagan Administration handle that? They got ag. state Republicans in the House to block the measure. I guess rice, tobacco, and weapons sales to Saddam were more important to Shultz, Weinberger and House Republicans than a few thousand gassed Kurds.

Further sickening details are given in the Irene Gendzier piece.

US tobacco dealers used the BNL [the bank responsible for clandestine financing of the Reagan-GHW Bush-era Iraq exports] to provide credit guarantees that allowed them to ship their products to Iraq, secure in the knowledge that they would be paid. The process was not entirely straightforward. As [Rep. Charlie] Rose [D-NC] explained, ``commodities were sold to Iraq under the export guarantee program at markups of over 100 percent. The profits associated with these transactions in some cases wound up in the Cayman Islands.''

So for Bush and his supporters to argue that the US war on Iraq is based on ``peace'' and ``justice'' in response to a Hitler/Saddam motif proven by invoking Saddam's chemical massacres, is hypocrisy of Biblical proportions. It's downright Orwellian. A look into the history of what then came to be called ``Iraqgate'' paints a picture much at variance with the one framed by today's hawks.

Thank you, Geoffrey Holland, for keeping hard on course on these issues.