French and Germans, both governments of the left and right, from the 70's onwards were heavily into commercial and military sales to the Iraqi Ba'athists. And the UK too. After the Gulf War the Brit parliament had an official inquiry. Just as Reagan did and Bush 41. The West "enabled" the Iraqi regime. See, for the US side of it, Peter Mantius, 'Shell Game, " and the readings in, "The Saddam Hussein Reader, " and Micah Sifry and Christopher Cerf, "The Iraq War Reader, " which came out just after the war officially was declared over. http://www.namebase.org/sources/YG.html Mantius, Peter. Shell Game: A Story of Banking, Spies, Lies, Politics, and the Arming of Saddam Hussein. New York: St.Martin's Press, 1995. 288 pages. When the feds arrested Christopher Drogoul in 1991, the manager of the Atlanta branch of the Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), they charged him with 347 felony counts. The story was that Drogoul had hoodwinked his Italian bosses and funneled billions to Saddam Hussein. The prosecutor, Gale McKenzie, was given her lines by U.S. intelligence insiders, and tried to place all of the blame on Drogoul. The bosses at BNL were only too happy to go along, and hired lawyers with close connections to the prosecution. But judge Marvin Shoob saw that the government was pulling a fast one. It was attempting to blame Drogoul for what amounted to an off-the-books effort by Fortune 500 corporations and U.S. policymakers to recruit Iraq as an ally, by giving them credits that were used to purchase arms.
Congressman Henry Gonzalez, who is a tenacious muckraker when his targets are Republicans, tried to make hay out of Iraqgate in 1992. But Shoob was sufficiently outspoken that he had to give the Drogoul case to another judge, whereupon Drogoul cut a deal and ended up serving 33 months. There was a bit of BNL fallout back in Italy, and an Iraqgate scandal in Britain, while in the U.S. the story was already dead. The fact that our media had been so unabashedly enthusiastic over the high-tech death and destruction of the Gulf War may have had something to do with it. ISBN 0-312-13169-0 Michael Pugliese