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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (15720)	3/5/2003 11:07:54 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

So US supplied weapons to Iraq but now they are doing what they think is right, but Germany supplied them weapons but they cannot be doing what they think is right now? I worry if we can't bring the Middle East to order that it will become the epicenter for WWIII and the end of a significant part of Human history. I worry about pretty much the same thing. The minor difference is that I fear WWIII might come BECAUSE Bush is fumbling around in the Middle East, like an elephant in a china store.

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (15720)	3/5/2003 11:43:03 AM
From: Bill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25898

Unfortunately, the truth is sometimes a casualty on this thread. The U.S. had an official policy of "strict neutrality" during the Iran/Iraq war. We didn't publicly ally with Saddam because it was well known in the international community that he was a murderous thug. But Iran was our sworn enemy and it was in our interests to make sure Iraq didn't lose, or if they did, make sure it took a very long time. Notwithstanding this incentive, we never established a close relationship to Saddam in spite of his overtures to us. With that as a backdrop, in 1985, our CIA secretly traded a shipment of ground weapons and munitions to Iraq in exchange for a valuable Iraqi intelligence report on Iran in 1985. From official unclassified documents I've read, this happened just once. The chemicals that were sent to Iraq in the mid-1980s were sold to Iraq by private U.S. and European companies in their raw form. They were dual use chemicals and agents that Iraq eventually processed and packaged into weapons. None of this absolves the U.S. of the accusation that we "backed" Saddam, but it puts the rationale and strength of that backing in perspective. And of course, none of it is relevant to today's crisis.