Who armed Saddam? (16 September 2002)
Published in Labour Left Briefing, October 2002.

Glen Rangwala explores Bush and Blair’s selective amnesia about Iraq’s chemical weapons.

As George Bush banged his war drums at the UN General Assembly on 12th September, he developed his vacuous theme that Saddam Hussein is the personification of all evil. Bush accompanied his speech with a 21-page dossier, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance", which pressed home the human rights abuses of the Iraqi regime with various quotes from Amnesty International reports.

Amnesty's response was swift. They noted that at least one of Bush's claims was simply false: Amnesty had never made one of the claims - on disappeared persons in Iraq - that Bush had attributed to them. More importantly, they blasted Bush's attempt to use human rights as a justification for a war of aggression: "Once again, the human rights record of a country is used selectively to legitimise military actions," they stated. "The US and other western governments turned a blind eye to Amnesty International reports of widespread human rights violations in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and ignored Amnesty's campaign on behalf of the thousands of unarmed Kurdish civilians killed in the 1988 attacks on Halabja."

Western governments did more than turn a blind eye, though, to Iraq's use of chemical weapons in the 1980s. The US in particular supplied the material, logistical information, political backing and finance to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Iraq's assault on Iran, then the West's enemy-in-chief, involved the use of mustard agents, and the nerve gases sarin and tabun, from 1981/82 to 1988. Thousands of Iranian conscripts were choked to death in the first years of the war, and Iranian civilians were targeted with chemical agents as part of a campaign of terror. This was the context in which the Iraqi regime learnt not to worry about the prospect of international condemnation, however murderous its acts.

The US was well aware of the use of chemical weapons. The Secretary of State later acknowledged he had been aware of reports from 1983, and an expert team from the UN confirmed Iraqi chemical attacks in March 1984. Nevertheless, the US administration provided "crop-spraying" helicopters to Iraq, which were subsequently used in chemical attacks on the Kurds in 1988. It gave Iraq access to intelligence information that allowed Iraq to "calibrate" its mustard attacks on Iranian troops in 1984. It seconded its air force officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts from 1986. It approved technological exports to Iraq's missile procurement agency to extend the missiles' range in 1988, and blocked bills condemning Iraq in the House of Representatives (1985) and Senate (1988).

Most crucially, the US and UK blocked condemnation of Iraq's known chemical weapons attacks at the UN Security Council. No resolution was passed during the war that specifically criticised Iraq's use of chemical weapons, despite the wishes of the majority. The only reproach from the Security Council was in the form of non-binding Presidential statements (over which no country has a veto). A statement in March 1986 recognised that "chemical weapons on many occasions have been used by Iraqi forces against Iranian forces". This statement was opposed by the US, the only country to vote against it in the Security Council. The UK abstained.

The second major dose of Saddam Hussein's chemicals was in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, from February to September 1988. Up to 186,000 Kurds were killed in these attacks, over 1,200 Kurdish villages were destroyed, and 300,000 Kurds were displaced. The most infamous chemical assault was on the town of Halabja in March 1988, which killed 5,000 people.

During the Anfal campaign, the US escalated its support for Iraq. It joined in Iraq's attacks on Iranian facilities, blowing up two Iranian oil rigs and destroying an Iranian frigate a month after the Halabja attack. Within two months, senior US officials were encouraging corporate coordination through an Iraqi state-sponsored forum. The US administration opposed, and eventually blocked, a US Senate bill that cut off loans to Iraq. The US approved exports to Iraq of items with dual civilian and military use at double the rate in the aftermath of Halabja as it did before 1988. Iraqi written guarantees about civilian use were accepted by the US commerce department, which did not request licenses and reviews (as it did for many other countries). The Bush Administration approved $695,000 worth of advanced data transmission devices the day before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

As for the UK, ten days after the Foreign Office verbally condemned the Halabja massacre, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry rewarded Iraq by extending £400 million worth of credits to trade with Iraq.

Both Blair and Bush cite Iraq's past use of chemical weapons as justification for an invasion. They would do well to recognise that the Iraqi regime has never used chemical weapons in the face of formal international opposition, only in the knowledge that it would be protected from condemnation and countermeasures by a superpower. There is no reason to suspect that Saddam Hussein now places any military gains he might achieve through the use of chemical weapons above his desire to form international alliances with major powers.

The Iraqi regime will hardly be dissuaded from using chemical weapons against the Kurds by provoking a further conflict between the Iraqi state and its Kurdish population. The original repression of the Kurds escalated into genocide in the aftermath of Iran's procurement of the support of the two main Kurdish parties for its military efforts from 1986. By seeking to recruit the Kurds as proxy forces for war preparations, Bush may end up recreating the same bloody processes that he now purports to condemn.