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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (115242)	9/19/2003 11:16:46 AM
From: Noel de Leon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

John; Curious that you should think that I wouldn't believe your figures. Thanks for sending them. My problem is that the 1 million Iraqis(560,000 children) died because of a boycott that was maintained even though(in hind sight) the WMDs were gone. So one could argue that poor US/western intelligence had some of the blame for these deaths. As to the intelligence of the Arabs and their ability to develop WMDs on their own, I have no doubt that they could and will. The incentive is even greater now that they can see what happens if one chooses between disarmament(Iraq) or WMD development(NK). As far as the minuscule weapons system contribution by the US I think it was much more than that during the Iraq/Iran war where the US supported Iraq 100%. But as you said, the lesser of two perceived evils.... But then again Google produced this: "“We have 24 major U.S. companies listed in the report who gave very substantial support especially to the biological weapons program but also to the missile and nuclear weapons program,” Zumach said. “Pretty much everything was illegal in the case of nuclear and biological weapons. Every form of cooperation and supplies… was outlawed in the 1970s.” The list of U.S. corporations listed in Iraq's report include Hewlett Packard, DuPont, Honeywell, Rockwell, Tectronics, Bechtel, International Computer Systems, Unisys, Sperry and TI Coating. Zumach also said the U.S. Departments of Energy, Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture quietly helped arm Iraq. U.S. government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia trained traveling Iraqi nuclear scientists and gave non-fissile material for construction of a nuclear bomb. “There has never been this kind of comprehensive layout and listing like we have now in the Iraqi report to the Security Council so this is quite new and this is especially new for the U.S. involvement, which has been even more suppressed in the public domain and the U.S. population,” Zumach said. The names of companies were supposed to be top secret. Two weeks ago Iraq provided two copies of its full 12,000-page report, one to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Geneva, and one to the United Nations in New York. Zumach said the U.S. broke an agreement of the Security Council and blackmailed Colombia, which at the time was presiding over the Council, to take possession of the UN’s only copy. The U.S. then proceeded to make copies of the report for the other four permanent Security Council nations, Britain, France, Russia and China. Only yesterday did the remaining members of the Security Council receive their copies. By then, all references to foreign companies had been removed. According to Zumach, only Germany had more business ties to Iraq than the U.S. As many as 80 German companies are also listed in Iraq’s report. The paper reported that some German companies continued to do business with Iraq until last year." scoop.co.nz No wonder that the US wanted the only copy. "...why didn't he tell the UN and end this back in Clintons first term?" Admitting that he had no WMDs would open him to attack from within and without. When he did say he had no WMDs(while under great external pressure) then the US didn't believe him because the documentation wasn't in order. The betrayal of the Shias and the Kurds are two slightly different betrayals. The Shias are an internal problem and were probably perceived by Bush I as being irrelevant. The Kurds are an external problem as well as an internal one. They were betrayed because of Turkish interests then and probably will be betrayed again. I seem to remember that early on in the Iraqi war there was talk about the Kurds getting an autonomous region. That got squashed early on. Betrayal yes. The lesser of perceived evils?