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.
In the 80s? I thought the USSR was backing Iran then. If not, why is the pecking order material?
Then a level down from that are France and Germany. Then everyone else.
From the numbers I've seen, I believe the US was right below France and Germany. However, its not the disclosure of the numbers and the competitive ranking of those numbers that is the main intent of the Congressional testimony but rather its the part that you deleted where the testifier talks of how America provided significant technology to a ruthless dictator and emboldened that dictator by giving him political support.
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.
I see. Then it doesn't matter who sells what. So there is not a moral issue here but rather who can make the most money.
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.
You need to read that section again. The deal never went thru......it was never a part of the total sum sold to Iraq. It was a precursor.....there was opposition in Congress to selling stuff to Iraq.......the administration intended to grease the skids with this initial deal. To make sure there would be no flack, they deleted the word 'military' from the licenses that were submitted to Congress and required their approval.
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.
You keep making that point like it makes everything okay.
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.
In a literary way, he did. But what does it matter? The testimony was presented to the US Congress, not the Dutch Parliament.
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.
Well, then nothing matters.........we should have sold Saddam missiles and nukes since he can probably get them from other places anyway.
And this guy never got to the chemicals and anthrax we sold Iraq. And I think uranium was on that list as well.
Are you defending what should be considered rather questionable dealings on the part of the US because they happened under two Rep. regimes, or do you think its unAmerican to criticize American interactions with other nations no matter how nefarious they are.......or is it unAmerican to criticize a Rep. president but its okay to trash a Dem. one? Which is it because I am sick of hearing from D. Ray and Steve Harris that I am traitor and unAmerican for speaking against American policy. I know if this happened under Clinton, that he would have been condemned to burn in eternal hell by you all.
So please, I would really like to understand the rules you all play under.
ted |
