Who Armed Saddam?

[NWO Sentryman]

It's an oft-repeated canard with Robin Cook etc. believing it that Britain and America Armed Saddam.

But why is it that in both iraq wars, most of the weapons encountered were...

... Of Soviet and Chinese Origin?

 

[imjohn]

I think lots of folks were willing to sell arms to Saddam.

 

[Praktik]

The Tanker War and U.S. support for Iraq

The Tanker War started when Iraq attacked Iranian tankers and the oil terminal at Kharg island in 1984. Iran struck back by attacking tankers carrying Iraqi oil from Kuwait and then any tanker of the Persian Gulf states supporting Iraq. The air and small boat attacks did very little damage to Persian Gulf state economies and Iran just moved its shipping port to Larak Island in the strait of Hormuz.[46]

In 1982 with Iranian success on the battlefield, the U.S. made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying it with intelligence, economic aid, normalizing relations with the government (broken during the 1967 Six-Day War), and also supplying "dual-use" equipment and vehicles. Dual use items are civilian items such as heavy trucks, armored ambulances and communications gear as well as industrial technology that can have a military application.[47] President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States "could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran", and that the United States "would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran."[48] President Reagan formalized this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive ("NSDD") to this effect in June, 1982.

 

[Praktik]

WOW

this one's meaty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran–Iraq_war

 

[NWO Sentryman]

http://www.thedissidentfrogman.com/blog/link/like-franco-saddam-is-dead/

Note the Graph.

Then explain the abundance of:

T-insert-number-here russian tanks

Mirage French fighter Jets

Mig-insert-number-here Russian fighter jets

J-7 Chinese Fighters

Type-insert-number-here Chinese Tanks

Gazelle French Helicopters

Mi-Inset number here Russian Helicopters

Russian Artillery pieces

AK-47s (Russian and Chinese)

PRKS (Russian and Chinese)

RPG-7s (Russian and Chinese)

BTR-insert-number here Russian APCs

Heck, Brazil Gave more hardware to Saddam than the US.

 

[Praktik]

Ya well it was a bonanza for arms dealers everywhere thats for sure.

 

[quadraginta]

Ya well it was a bonanza for arms dealers everywhere thats for sure.

The wiki article you cited above provides some interesting insights, not least of which is,

The United States assisted Iraq through a military aid program known as "Bear Spares", whereby the U.S. military "made sure that spare parts and ammunition for Soviet or Soviet-style weaponry were available to countries which sought to reduce their dependence on the Soviets for defense needs."[17] According to Howard Teicher's court sworn declaration:

If the "Bear Spares" were manufactured outside the United States, then the U.S. could arrange for the provision of these weapons to a third country without direct involvement. Israel, for example, had a very large stockpile of Soviet weaponry and ammunition captured during its various wars. At the suggestion of the United States, the Israelis would transfer the spare parts and weapons to third countries... Similarly, Egypt manufactured weapons and spare parts from Soviet designs and provided these weapons and ammunition to the Iraqis and other countries.​

...and ...

The "Iraqgate" scandal revealed that an Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed loans, funneled over US$ 5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. In August 1989, when FBI agents finally raided the Atlanta branch of BNL, the branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq – an unspecified amount of which, according to his indictment, was used to purchase arms and weapons technology. The CIA had previously concealed this information from the Congress, according to senior analyst Melvin A. Goodman.[36]

Additionally, NWO's graph in the link he cited can only tangentially be described as relevant, since it covers a 29 year period of which only 9 are particularly concerned with any U.S.military support of Iraq, and leaves unanswered the question of what support other than "weapons importations" were forthcoming from the U.S., and what involvement the U.S. had in sanctioning (or even aiding) weapons sales from other nations.

It's really a very disingenuous sort of graph.

 

[Simon39759]

Didn't the U.S help mostly consist of assistance, like training (including in guerilla-style warfare, ironically enough) and spare parts? As well as direct but totally off the book intervention from the special forces?

 

[NWO Sentryman]

i know there was some sort of dual use tech being given such as trucks and helicopters.

I also know that the US gave some intel to the iraqis.

But everyone chimes that big lie that America Armed Saddam. That annoys me.

 

[theprestige]

As well as direct but totally off the book intervention from the special forces?

That's an excellent question! And just as soon as you are able to show where on the book that "totally off the book" support is specified, you're more than welcome to include it in your list of things the US did for Saddam.

Unless, of course, you want me to point out that Vladimir Putin personally delivered ten times more "totally off the book" special forces support to Saddam than America ever did.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

i know there was some sort of dual use tech being given such as trucks and helicopters.

I also know that the US gave some intel to the iraqis.

But everyone chimes that big lie that America Armed Saddam. That annoys me.

Do you have everyone else who posted in this thread on ignore?

 

[Simon39759]

That's an excellent question! And just as soon as you are able to show where on the book that "totally off the book" support is specified, you're more than welcome to include it in your list of things the US did for Saddam.

Unless, of course, you want me to point out that Vladimir Putin personally delivered ten times more "totally off the book" special forces support to Saddam than America ever did.

And that's why I included it as a question, because I did not have any good source for it.

 

[linusrichard]

Puzzling evidence.

 

[theprestige]

And that's why I included it as a question, because I did not have any good source for it.

Why even bring it up, if you have no source?

 

[ponderingturtle]

i know there was some sort of dual use tech being given such as trucks and helicopters.

I also know that the US gave some intel to the iraqis.

But everyone chimes that big lie that America Armed Saddam. That annoys me.

That is not the claim I see most often, and that is that the US was one of his strongest supporters, and best allies. Not that he used US manufactured arms.

 

[NWO Sentryman]

No i do not have everyone on ignore.

 

[Simon39759]

Why even bring it up, if you have no source?

Because it makes sense (we know that the U.S did at least perform one very classified mission deep in Iran territory) and is relevant to the discussion.

 

[quadraginta]

i know there was some sort of dual use tech being given such as trucks and helicopters.

I also know that the US gave some intel to the iraqis.

But everyone chimes that big lie that America Armed Saddam. That annoys me.

That is not the claim I see most often, and that is that the US was one of his strongest supporters, and best allies. Not that he used US manufactured arms.

NWO wants to imply that these two statements,

".. America Armed Saddam." (his)

... and ...

"... he used US manufactured arms." (yours)

​

are equivalent, so that he can pretend to disprove the fact that we provided massive military assistance to Saddam for nearly a decade.

He also uses statements like ...

"... the US gave some intel to the iraqis."

​

when the use of the word "some" in this context is so incredibly disingenuous as to be comic.

In conformance with the Presidential directive, the U.S. began providing tactical battlefield advice to the Iraqi Army. "The prevailing view", says Alan Friedman, "was that if Washington wanted to prevent an Iranian victory, it would have to share some of its more sensitive intelligence photography with Saddam."[3]

At times, thanks to the White House's secret backing for the intelligence-sharing, U.S. intelligence officers were actually sent to Baghdad to help interpret the satellite information. As the White House took an increasingly active role in secretly helping Saddam direct his armed forces, the United States even built an expensive high-tech annex in Baghdad to provide a direct down-link receiver for the satellite intelligence and better processing of the information... p. 27

The American military commitment that had begun with intelligence-sharing expanded rapidly and surreptitiously throughout the Iran–Iraq War. A former White House official explained that "by 1987, our people were actually providing tactical military advice to the Iraqis in the battlefield, and sometimes they would find themselves over the Iranian border, alongside Iraqi troops." p. 38
​

Author Barry M. Lando says, by 1987, the U.S. military was so invested in the correct outcome, that "officers from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency dispatched to Baghdad were actually planning day-by-day strategic bombing strikes for the Iraqi Air Force."[20][7] Iraq used this data to target Iranian positions with chemical weapons, according to ambassador Galbraith.[15]

(source)

I don't have the citation at hand, as it has been years since I read it, but I understand that we provided Saddam with raw intelligence data so sensitive and revealing of our intel capabilities that it was too secret to share with any of our more traditional military partners, including the British and the Israelis.

More thinly veiled distortion from NWO ...

" i know there was some sort of dual use tech being given such as trucks and helicopters."
​

How about ...

About two of every seven licenses for the export of "dual use" technology items approved between 1985 and 1990 by the U.S. Department of Commerce "went either directly to the Iraqi armed forces, to Iraqi end-users engaged in weapons production, or to Iraqi enterprises suspected of diverting technology" to weapons of mass destruction, according to an investigation by House Banking Committee Chairman Henry B. Gonzalez. Confidential Commerce Department files also reveal that the Reagan and Bush administrations approved at least 80 direct exports to the Iraqi military. These included computers, communications equipment, aircraft navigation and radar equipment.[19]

... or ...

On May 25 1994, the U.S. Senate Banking Committee released a report in which it was stated that "pathogenic (meaning 'disease producing'), toxigenic (meaning 'poisonous'), and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq pursuant to application and licensing by the U.S. Department of Commerce." It added: "These exported biological materials were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction."[30]
The report then detailed 70 shipments (including Bacillus anthracis) from the United States to Iraqi government agencies over three years, concluding "It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program."[31]

... or ...

Donald Riegle, Chairman of the Senate committee that authored the aforementioned Riegle Report, said:

U.N. inspectors had identified many United States manufactured items that had been exported from the United States to Iraq under licenses issued by the Department of Commerce, and [established] that these items were used to further Iraq's chemical and nuclear weapons development and its missile delivery system development programs. ... The executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licenses for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think that is a devastating record.
​

... or ...

Even before the Persian Gulf War started in 1990, the Intelligencer Journal of Pennsylvania in a string of articles reported: "If U.S. and Iraqi troops engage in combat in the Persian Gulf, weapons technology developed in Lancaster and indirectly sold to Iraq will probably be used against U.S. forces ... And aiding in this ... technology transfer was the Iraqi-owned, British-based precision tooling firm Matrix Churchill, whose U.S. operations in Ohio were recently linked to a sophisticated Iraqi weapons procurement network."[34]
"One entire facility, a tungsten-carbide manufacturing plant that was part of the Al Atheer complex," Kenneth Timmerman informed the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, "was blown up by the IAEA in April 1992 because it lay at the heart of the Iraqi clandestine nuclear weapons program, PC-3. Equipment for this plant appears to have been supplied by the Latrobe, Pennsylvania manufacturer, Kennametal, and by a large number of other American companies, with financing provided by the Atlanta branch of the BNL bank."[37]

At some point during the whole "dual use" fiasco even the Joint Chiefs of Staff began to express concern about the dangerous technology we were dumping into Iraq. My understanding is that the Reagan administration dismissed their concerns as "ankle biters".

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It doesn't require a great deal of effort, either on-line or in any decent library, to determine without any shadow of doubt the mind-numbing amount of military backing we shoveled into Iraq during the 80's.

It's okay to discuss justifications for these actions within the context of those times. It's also okay (although unlikely within the context of this thread) to concede the error of those actions and use that history as a basis to make better decisions in the future.

It is not okay to pretend that it never happened, and to try with the aid of cheap sophomoric verbal tricks to minimize and dismiss the truth out of hand.

 

[NWO Sentryman]

well, i stand corrected on the dual use and the intel.

But i am just sick of hearing "The US is responsibel for every single death in iraq because they armed saddam"

Source: CapitalistHolocaust and Mr1001nights.

But it was in the context of the Iran-Iraq war. Reagan and the JCS realised the ramifictions if either won, and decided to turn them on each other.

 

[quadraginta]

well, i stand corrected on the dual use and the intel.

A noble concession. You have earned my respect.

But i am just sick of hearing "The US is responsibel for every single death in iraq because they armed saddam"

Don't diminish that by goalpost moving.

Source: CapitalistHolocaust and Mr1001nights.

Maybe you might want to peruse different sources. There's a ridiculous extreme for nearly every viewpoint, even the ones with merit. They're not too difficult to recognize, or to disregard.

But it was in the context of the Iran-Iraq war. Reagan and the JCS realised the ramifictions if either won, and decided to turn them on each other.

This might be true, but is probably a discussion deserving of its own thread.