collective guilt

Who armed Iraq? (excerpts from a Chronicle story)
Paul Rockwell Sunday, March 2, 2003
Iraq's Weapons Declaration underscores a tragic irony: The United States, the world's leading arms supplier, is taking the world to war to stop arms proliferation in the very country to which it shipped chemicals, biological seed stock and weapons for more than 10 years.
According to the December declaration, treated with much derision from the Bush administration, U.S. and Western companies played a key role in building Hussein's war machine. The 1,200-page document contains a list of Western corporations and countries -- as well as individuals -- that exported chemical and biological materials to Iraq in the past two decades.
Embarrassed, no doubt, by revelations of their own complicity in Mideast arms proliferation, the U.S.-led Security Council censored the entire dossier, deleting more than 100 names of companies and groups that profited from Iraq's crimes and aggression. The censorship came too late, however. The long list -- including names of large U.S. corporations -- Dupont, Hewlett-Packard, and Honeywell -- was leaked to a German daily, Die Tageszeitung. Despite the Security Council coverup, the truth came out.
A German company, for example, exported 1,000 ignition systems for Styx and Scud missiles capable of carrying biological and nuclear warheads.
Alcolac International, a Maryland company, transported thiodiglycol, a mustard gas precursor, to Iraq. A Tennessee manufacturer contributed large amounts of a chemical used to make sarin, a nerve gas implicated in Gulf War diseases.
Phyllis Bennis, author of "Before and After," notes that "the highest quality seed-stock for anthrax germs (along with those of botulism, E. coli, and a host of other deadly diseases) were shipped to Iraq by U.S. companies, legally, under an official U.S. Department of Commerce license throughout the 1980s." A Senate Banking subcommittee report in 1994 confirmed that shipments of biological germ stock continued well into 1989.
According to Judith Miller in "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War," Iraq purchased its seed stock -- its "starter germs" -- from "The American Type Culture Collection," a supply company in a Washington, D.C., suburb.
We tend to forget that the Reagan-Bush administration maintained cordial relations with Hussein in the '80s, promoting Iraq's eight-year war against Iran. Twenty-four U.S. firms exported arms and materials to Baghdad. France also sent Hussein 200 AMX medium tanks, Mirage bombers and Gazelle helicopter gunships. As Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage testified in 1987:
"We cannot stand to see Iraq defeated." The CIA, State Department, the central military command directing Middle East operations, were well aware of Iraq's biological-weapons efforts. Nevertheless, Iraq's applications were seldom denied.

The infamous massacre at Halabja -- the gassing of the Kurds -- took place in March 1988. Six months later, on Sept. 19, a Maryland company sent 11 strains of germs -- four types of anthrax -- to Iraq, including a microbe strain called 11966, developed for germ warfare at Fort Detrick in the 1950s.
The vast, lucrative arms trade in the Middle East created the groundwork for Hussein's aggression in Kuwait. Without high-tech weapons from the West, Iraq's wars against Iran and Kuwait would never have taken place.
The inspection process is spawning a host of questions about U.S. policy. Why aren't U.S. and European scientists, who invented and produced lethal materials for Saddam Hussein, subject to interrogations like their counterparts in Iraq? Are U.S. companies sending their deadly material to other dictators? Why are there no congressional hearings on the U.S. role in arms proliferation? And how many senators (like the voice of Connecticut's arms industry, Sen. Joe Lieberman) are taking contributions from the world's arms dealers?
The United States exports more weapons than all other countries combined, and Hussein is only one of many human rights abusers who purchased the means of terror from the West.
No despot, no monarchy, no medieval insurgency that can be exploited, no regime of terror seems to be off-limits to the sale of arms for profit.
From 1983-88, Siad Barre, the mad dictator of Somalia, received from the United States 155 howitzers, 20mm Vulcan air defense guns, light artillery pieces, mortars, anti-tank rocket launchers, a mass of firearms and ammunition.
By 1989, its precious desert water holes demolished, the impoverished country was in open revolt. When Siad Barre fled, he left the country in ruins,
and he left all his U.S. weapons behind -- the very weapons that enabled warrior clans to bring down U.S. Black Hawks and kill 70 U.S. and U.N. humanitarian troops.
On the edge of famine, Somalia today is still awash in U.S. weaponry, as 14- year-old children carry hand-me-down rifles through the streets of Mogadishu.

Of all the arguments against war with Iraq the argument that "We helped him in the past and now we want to kill him, we're hypocrites" is the weakest.

As I recall we were buddies once with the world's greatest mass murderer (Stalin) in the fight against the world's second greatest mass murderer (Hitler). Does anyone believe that "friendship of convenience" made us hypocrites for resisting Soviet attempts at world domination after WWII? Hello? Anyone?

One could make the argument that the perceived necessity for the "alliance" with Saddam is the fault of Jimmy Carter, who strong-armed the Shah of Iran (our ally who didn't have territorial ambitions, but was oppressive to some of his people) into resigning, turning Iran over to the radical Islamic fundamentalists, who were then perceived (accurately, as judged by their support for international terror AND oppressing their own people) an even greater threat than Saddam.

you see, this is another area where we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. If we become isolationists and get out of world affairs and trade, we are starving the poor countries that depend on that trade and that's why they'll hate us. If we engage in trade with them, we are imperialist scum only interested in how much we can leech from these poor innocent countries.
If we send troops to defeat a tyranical regime, we are imperialists who have no right to be there and are only doing so for monetary concerns--that's why they hate us. If we arm the enemies of such a regime so as to keep our sons and daughters out of harms way, we are dealing arms for monetary concerns with no respect for human rights--that's why they hate us.
The world is a fluid situation. One day's enemy is the next week's best buddy. That's just the way life is.

you know, I find myself laughing repeatedly the last few minutes...due to Herb's underlining of the topics, I intially thought the thread was 'collective Quilt'. Being of %150 PA dutch descent, I thought I may have some real input on it...