[AleoMagus]

Saddam had anthrax all right, and you americans should know - you gave it to him.

The following is an excerpt fron an AWTW news service article:

In March 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein sent in his air force to bomb Halabja for three days. This Iraqi Kurdish town is 11 kilometres from the Iranian border, and Saddam wanted to punish its inhabitants for taking advantage of the war to rise up against his regime. On March 16, Iraqi jet fighters made 20 bombing runs, dropping chemical and nerve gas on Halabja. They killed more than 5,000 people within a few hours.

Now, in his 29 January State of the Union speech, President Bush used this incident as a reason for the US to go to war against Iraq: “The dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured.”

The problem with Bush’s story is that the US helped Iraq perpetrate that attack and then covered up for Saddam. In fact, Bush’s own people are personally responsible.

In 1980, alarmed by the overthrow of the keystone to American influence in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, the US encouraged Iraq to attack Iran. As the current issue of A World to Win magazine explains, “Later, as famously revealed in the ‘Iran-Contra’ scandal, the US also gave weapons to Iran to prolong the war and make sure that there was as much killing and mutual weakening of both regimes as possible. (A million people died in this war.)

“The US first sent anthrax stock to Iraq in 1978, with seven shipments in all in the following decade. President Reagan sent Rumsfeld as his special envoy to meet with Saddam in December 1983, and re-opened the US embassy in Baghdad. In March 1984, the day that the UN released a report condemning Iraq’s use of poisonous gas against Iranian troops, Rumsfeld was meeting with Saddam’s Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz. In 1986, the Pentagon assigned officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts to increase the killing power of Saddam’s air force. In March 1988, that air force dropped gas bombs on Halabja, an Iraqi village under the control of rebel Kurds, killing several thousand civilians. German companies provided the gas itself. Amidst world uproar and protest, US officials claimed that they had reviewed the evidence and found it ‘inconclusive’. That year, under the presidency of Bush the father, Washington approved the export of virus cultures for military use to Iraq, as well as a $1 billion private contract to build a petrochemical plant designed to be equally usable to make mustard gas. Bush senior also approved sending Iraq $500 million in aid (in the form of subsidies to buy American farm products) and doubled that the following year. The UK, too, sent Iraq weapons-related equipment after the Halabja attack.… Eventually, the Iranian regime became more ‘reasonable’ by US standards and Saddam’s ambitions proved to be a less than perfect fit with those of the American imperialists, so Bush the father set out to destroy Iraqi power in 1991.”

In fact, in 1988, Bush’s father prevented the UN Security Council from condemning Iraq for the same crime that Bush the son is now trying to use as a moral pretext to once again bomb and invade Iraq.

For the record, UN sanctions have directly led to the deaths of over a million citizens of iraq - mostly children.

I know Saddam is a bad guy, and it is good for Iraq that he is gone, but don't kid yourself about the Bush administration either - they have more chemical, biological, nuclear weapons than they could have ever expected to find in Iraq in GWB's biggest wet dream. I don't know why though, when it is so easy to kill a million here or there with diplomacy alone. I guess the American's nukes and chemicals are ok though because they would never use them (they give them to other people to use, then attack those guys later).

Regards,
Brad S