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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (67648)	2/6/2003 1:05:21 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 70976

West broke international law backing Iraq against Iran London, Feb 4 - Former British Foreign Secretary Lord Owen Tuesday accused Western countries of breaching international law by supporting Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 1980-88 war against Iran, IRNA said. "Western democracies need to acknowledge that by ignoring Saddam Hussein's flagrant breach of international law in September 1980 when he invaded Iran and then used gas warfare on the Iranians, we fed his megalomania," Owen said. He partly excused Britain and others countries of sustaining Iraq during its 8-year war with information and arms, saying that it was "tempting" following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the take-over of the US Embassy in Tehran. "We hoped the Iranian revolutionary zeal would be burnt out in the region," said Owen, who served as Foreign Secretary during the revolution. But he warned that it put the "west on the wrong side of international law, it encouraged Saddam Hussein to believe he could invade Kuwait and it fostered justified bitterness inside Iran." The former Labor Foreign Secretary argued in an article in the Guardian on the eve of Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi's visit to London that for the UK and US to win support for a new war against Iraq "there has to be recognition of past errors." He said "otherwise cynicism will prevail." He said it was "deeply troubling" that there was not greater public support for US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in their campaign to defeat Saddam. This in part, he said, was because there were unlikely to be new discoveries by UN inspectors. "A deeper reason is the growing public awareness of the highly manipulative and dubious covert way in which western governments have handled Saddam for the past 22 years," Owen admitted. He also suggested that it could help if the West admitted to "only feeble protests" when Saddam used gas in March 1988 to kill over 5,000 Kurds in Halabja.