Was the United States Iraq's principle supplier of arms or advanced production technology? Certainly not. Those honors must go to France and Germany.
Russia first. Then a level down from that are France and Germany. Then everyone else.
From January 1985 through August 1990 the Department of Commerce approved 771 license applications valued at $1.5 billion.
Of these, 167 licenses worth $58,095,322 concerned advanced computing systems.
These turned out to be useful to Iraq in developing missiles and perhaps WMD, so selling them was probably a mistake, but Iraq would have just gotten sufficently powerful comptuers from France, Germany, Japan or someone else. Also this wasn't a sale of weapons. At the time computers like these where being sold to most of the world, and Iraq was just being treated like any other country. It didn't get some special favor in being allowed to buy computers.
The single largest sale was a $491 million proposal to sell Iraq several thousand military cargo trucks.
Certainly trucks are useful to the military but they are not themselves weapons, and they are easy to buy. Iraq could have gotten them from more then a dozen other sources. I don't really blame former presidents for allowing Iraq to buy trucks.
American military sales to Iraq began in December 1982, when the Reagan Administration agreed to support the sale of 60 Hughes MD 500 "Defender" helicopters to Baghdad, despite their obvious military applications.
This might be the worst example of conventional weapons sales to Iraq, but they were not WMD and Iraq could have bought helicopters from lots of other countries. Russia, or even France would not have hesitated to sell them.
Another, particularly egregious case of U.S. military equipment winding up in Iraqi weapons systems involves a
Dutch company called Delft Instruments N.V. Delft purchased infra-red sensors and thermal imaging scanners from
U.S. defense contractors, and re-exported them illegally to Iraq.
So a Dutch company illegal resells American equipment to Iraq. Why doesn't the author bust the Dutch for this instead of the Americans.
The Iraqis used this equipment successfully during
their night attack across the border into the Saudi town of Kafji.
Nothing can really said to have been succesfull about the Iraqi attack at Kafji. It was a stupid bloody mess. Even though the Americans did not hoe some reason bring in a heavy bombing response against the forward elements of the attack before they reach Kafji, they destroyed any reinforcements. American losses where light the Iraqi force was mostly destroyed or prevented from reaching the battle.
• spectrometers, oscilloscopes, and other precision scientific instruments
• electron beam welders to make uranium enrichment centrifuges,
• high-precision machine tools to make bomb cores
• sophisticated numerical controllers, and high-power computers
• neutron initiators and high-speed switches for nuclear detonation
• vacuum pumps for centrifuge and calutron enrichment units
• rare lubricants needed to make the centrifuges work.
Unfortunatly little effort was made to control a lot of this stuff. Some company would say it was for civilan use and the commerce department would allow the sale to happen. This doesn't just apply to Iraq, important "dual use" items where sold all over the world.
Tim |
