But there is an even more striking instance of the United States ignoring use of the chemical weapons that killed tens of thousands of people — during the grinding Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s. As documented in 2002 by Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, the Reagan administration knew full well it was selling materials to Iraq that was being used for the manufacture of chemical weapons, and that Iraq was using such weapons, but U.S. officials were more concerned about whether Iran would win rather than how Iraq might eke out a victory. Dobbs noted that Iraq’s chemical weapons’ use was “hardly a secret, with the Iraqi military issuing this warning in February 1984: ”The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.”

Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to “almost daily use of CW” against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president’s recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld. In 1988, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered chemical weapons attacks against Kurdish resistance forces, but the relationship with Iraq at the time was deemed too important to rupture over the matter. The United States did not even impose sanctions. Without much apparent irony, two decades later Rumsfeld and other members of the then George W. Bush administration repeatedly cited Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against own people as a justification for invading Iraq. (Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill did not respond to questions about her views on how the Reagan administration handled the Iraqi situation.) For interested readers, we have embedded below an English translation of the French intelligence report on the alleged chemical weapons attack last month because it includes a history of the Syrian chemical weapons program.