For the Bush administration, the question is embarrassing: Who supplied Saddam Hussein with materials of mass destruction? Where did his military regime, known for its atrocities against the Iranians and Kurds, acquire fighter planes, helicopters, tanks, germs and lethal chemicals — an arsenal of terror?
The answer is no longer in dispute.
In violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which outlaws chemical warfare, the Reagan administration authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses throughout the ’80s. In 1982, while Hussein constructed his machinery of war, Reagan removed Iraq from the State Department list of terrorist states.
As special envoy for Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld met with Hussein in December 1983 to offer U.S. military backing in Iraq’s war against Iran, during which millions of civilians were slaughtered. According to newly declassified documents, Iraq was already using chemical weapons on an “almost daily basis,” when Rumsfeld consolidated this military alliance.
The Pentagon supplied logistical and military support and the CIA, using a Chilean conduit, increased Hussein’s supply of cluster bombs. U.S. companies also supplied, ironically, the types of weapons materials for which the U.N. Security Council is now searching.
U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, head of the Progressive Caucus, uncovered more information recently. As late as 1989 and 1990, U.S. companies, under permits from the first Bush administration, sent mustard gas precursors and live cultures for bacteriological research to Iraq. U.S. companies helped Iraq build a chemical weapons factory, and then shipped Hussein hydrogen cyanide precursors and parts for a new nuclear plant.
The infamous massacre at Halabja — the gassing of the Kurds — took place in March 1988. On Sept. 19, 1988, six months later, U.S. companies sent 11 strains of germs to Iraq, including a microbe strain called 11966 developed for germ warfare at Fort Detrick in the ’50s. When Hussein’s atrocities fulfilled U.S. strategic aims, war supplies flowed unendingly. Bush turned against Hussein only after he threatened Western access to oil in the Gulf.
The vast, lucrative arms trade in the Middle East laid the groundwork for Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait. Without high-tech weapons from Europe and the U.S., Iraq’s wars against Iran and Kuwait would never have taken place. Revelations of the U.S. role in Iraq’s arms buildup spawn a host of questions: Why aren’t U.S. and European scientists, who invented and produced lethal materials for Hussein, subject to interrogations, like their counterparts in Iraq?
Are U.S. companies sending their deadly material to other dictators? Why are there no Congressional hearings on the companies that profit from the traffic
in arms?
Now the world is faced with a tragic irony: The world’s leading merchant of death is taking us to war to stop arms proliferation in the region to which it shipped chemicals and arms for more than 10 years. If a war crimes trial were held today, U.S. officials and company executives could be tried for crimes against humanity along with Hussein’s own regime.
Under the Nuremberg principles and the laws of war, human rights are measured by one yardstick. It’s not just the buyers, it is the suppliers of death who are accountable for their handiwork.
Paul Rockwell is a freelance writer from Oakland, Calif.