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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (134049)	5/23/2004 11:07:04 AM
From: h0db	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, you are glossing over quite a bit of history, perhaps for the sake of brevity. The key thing motivating US policy with respect to Iraq during the Reagan era was Iran. I agree that most US support to Iraq was tacit, excepting some intelligence sharing. We looked the other way when it came to weapons sales to Iraq from Russia, China, some Europeans, even though there supposedly was a ban on weapons sales to both belligerents in the Iran-Iraq war. Our focus was on "Operation Staunch" to prevent the delivery of weapons to Iran. When Desert Storm was over and the battlefield was littered with Iraqi armor and artillery, the overwhelming majority of the vehicles we recovered were Chinese, along with Russian T-72s, BMP-1s and BTRs. There were a lot of Chinese Type-69 tanks (modified T-54B) and Type-63 APCs. Thousands. All of which were delivered during the Iran-Iraq war, when the US was working very closely with the Chinese to equip and train the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and to overthrow the Hang Sen regime in Cambodia. Try to find one example where the US protested Russian, Czech, Chinese, Brazilian, et. al. arms sales to Iraq. The Iraq's weren't going to buy our kit anyway--the Israeli lobby would never have stood for it (rightly) and Baghdad couldn't afford it. But our willingness to look the other way while we sought to staunch the flow to Iran should not be underestimated--even after the Iraqis put an Exocet into the USS Stark.