> This is very misleading.
Putzy misleading? A head case who cites Little Green Footballs? Surely you kid!
> Note what kind of weapons the US-SUPPLIED Iraqi Army uses - you
> remember, the weapons, many of which could not be accounted for?
>
> They are Kalashnikovs, not American or European assault rifles. It's
> no accident that Soviet-bloc (or former Soviet-bloc) weapons are the
> mainstay of almost every force in the developing world. They are
> cheaper to buy and maintain.
They are also superior weapons. I knew many guys in the Army who preferred them to M-16s.
> What really matters is where the money came from.
>
> I refer you to this page:
>
> http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
>
> Please note the identity of the man with whom Saddam Hussein is shaking
> hands.
Yes, yes. But that doesn't matter to Putz. Exonerating the US in helping Saddam is a higher calling.
Of course, there was that 2002 Newsweek piece, "How Saddam Happened," to consider. Wrote authors Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas:
"The war against Iran was going badly by 1982. Iran's 'human wave attacks' threatened to overrun Saddam's armies. Washington decided to give Iraq a helping hand. After Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad in 1983, U.S. intelligence began supplying the Iraqi dictator with satellite photos showing Iranian deployments. Official documents suggest that America may also have secretly arranged for tanks and other military hardware to be shipped to Iraq in a swap deal-American tanks to Egypt, Egyptian tanks to Iraq. Over the protest of some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of 'dual use' equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam's Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television cameras for 'video surveillance applications'; chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments of 'bacteria/fungi/protozoa' to the IAEC. According to former officials, the bacteria cultures could be used to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons, but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds.
"The United States almost certainly knew from its own satellite imagery that Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian troops. When Saddam bombed Kurdish rebels and civilians with a lethal cocktail of mustard gas, sarin, tabun and VX in 1988, the Reagan administration first blamed Iran, before acknowledging, under pressure from congressional Democrats, that the culprits were Saddam's own forces. There was only token official protest at the time. Saddam's men were unfazed. An Iraqi audiotape, later captured by the Kurds, records Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid (known as Ali Chemical) talking to his fellow officers about gassing the Kurds. 'Who is going to say anything?' he asks. 'The international community? F-k them!'"
<http://foi.missouri.edu/terrorbkgd/howsaddam.html>
But Jeff Weintraub probably knows better.
Dennis