How did Iraq get its weapons? We sold them.
Lost among the weeping and gnashing of teeth over whether we should turn Iraq into a parking lot is this truth: much of Iraq's weapons capabilities stem from materials WE SOLD TO THEM. Anything to make a buck, eh?
THE US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological wea pons of mass destruction.
Reports by the US Senate's committee on banking, housing and urban affairs -- which oversees American exports policy -- reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Snr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.
Classified US Defence Dep-artment documents also seen by the Sunday Herald show that Britain sold Iraq the drug pralidoxine, an antidote to nerve gas, in March 1992, after the end of the Gulf war. Pralidoxine can be reverse engineered to create nerve gas.
The Senate committee's reports on 'US Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual-Use Exports to Iraq', undertaken in 1992 in the wake of the Gulf war, give the date and destination of all US exports....
The shipments to Iraq went on even after Saddam Hussein ordered the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in which at least 5000 men, women and children died. The atrocity, which shocked the world, took place in March 1988, but a month later the components and materials of weapons of mass destruction were continuing to arrive in Baghdad from the US.
The Senate report also makes clear that: 'The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programmes.'
This assistance, according to the report, included 'chemical warfare-agent precursors, chem ical warfare-agent production facility plans and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment, biological warfare-related materials, missile fabrication equipment and missile system guidance equipment'.
Between January, 1985 and August, 1990, the executive branch of the US government approved 771 export licenses for sale of "dual use" technologies to Iraq. One could easily argue, then, that the US and Britain provided Iraq with most of it's current capabilities. What did our government think these "dual use" technologies were going to be used for? Baby milk factories? Could it be possible that officials were so intent on drumming up business for big campaign contributors that they glossed over, or (worse) ignored completely their suspicions about what these materials could be used for?
Perhaps the biggest weakness in Shrub's argument is Scott Ritter, a card-carrying Republican who voted for Shrub but says that he doubts Iraq could have rebuilt most of it's chemical weapons capabilities.
[Ritter] has called the president a 'liar' over his claims that Saddam Hussein is a threat to America.
Ritter has also alleged that the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons emits certain gases, which would have been detected by satellite. 'We have seen none of this,' he insists. 'If Iraq was producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof.'
He also dismisses claims that Iraq may have a nuclear weapons capacity or be on the verge of attaining one, saying that gamma-particle atomic radiation from the radioactive materials in the warheads would also have been detected by western surveillance.
Ritter is not the only person with direct experience who is doubting Shrub's veracity:
The UN's former co-ordinator in Iraq and former UN under-secretary general, Count Hans von Sponeck, has also told the Sunday Herald that he believes the West is lying about Iraq's weapons programme.
Von Sponeck visited the Al-Dora and Faluja factories near Baghdad in 1999 after they were 'comprehensively trashed' on the orders of UN inspectors, on the grounds that they were suspected of being chemical weapons plants. He returned to the site late in July this year, with a German TV crew, and said both plants were still wrecked.
'We filmed the evidence of the dishonesty of the claims that they were producing chemical and biological weapons,' von Sponeck has told the Sunday Herald. 'They are indeed in the same destroyed state which we witnessed in 1999. There was no trace of any resumed activity at all.'
Personally, I think the truth lies (as it is wont to do) somewhere in the middle. My sense (admittedly, this is a guess) is that the Iraqis have been able to rebuild some of their capabilities, but probably not to the degree that Shrub claims. My concern is that Shrub seems convinced that going to war against Iraq is the only solution to this problem.
Of course, the question that should be answered is why were these "dual use" technologies sold to Iraq, particularly after Halabja? That is a very easily fixable problem, because the problems are on our shores.
The longer this issue drags out, the more it seems that Shrub NEEDS to go to war. Of course, there are sound reasons for doing this. There's nothing like a good war to pump up the economy, eh? Not only that, but once we begin kicking some Iraqi ass, Americans will begin feeling better about themselves, which can only help Shrub's approval ratings. Mid-term elections ARE just around the corner, and he can't count on Florida this time around....
