Who Armed Iraq?

The anti-war left claims Saddam's weapons -- conventional and WMD -- came from the U.S. The tin-foil hat brigade touts this alleged hypocrisy as somehow negating justification for the Invasion. This notion is nonsensical, as Christopher Hitchens (and others) argue: if America armed Saddam, America had an especial responsibility to depose him.

In any event, the "it's America's fault" meme is largely a myth. Though the U.S. sold dual-use chemicals to Iraq, the amount is exaggerated. Moreover, those chemicals were mostly not precursors to any chemical weapons Iraq deployed or used. (The US consistently condemned their use in warfare.) And U.S. sales were trivial compared to others. James Ruhland sourced Iraq's weapon inventory at the time of the first Gulf War (90-91)--none came from America. Moreover, in early 2003, Admiral Quixote created two charts based on data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute:


Saddam's Sources (click to enlarge)



Saddam's Sources With A UN Veto (click to enlarge)

When Saddam was toppled, Iraq's largest sovereign debt was to Russia ($25 billion), France ($5 billion) and China ($5 billion); as Stephen Green commented, "Is it any coincidence that these are three of the loudest voices against us getting into Saddam's filing cabinets?"

To that evidence, we can add another contemporaneous study, noticed at Cao's Blog and linked to by GM's Corner. The report, titled Project Babylon: Who Armed Iraq?, was published in the April 2003 Investigate Magazine (Australian/New Zeeland):

The WMD (weapons of mass destruction) trail begins in 1975 when Saddam Hussein – at that stage still the Vice President of Iraq - joined forces with French Prime Minister (now President) Jacques Chirac in a deal to purchase French military equipment and armaments.

Hussein had, only weeks earlier, signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to purchase a nuclear reactor facility from the Russians, but the Soviet deal contained a catch: Russia was insisting on safeguards to ensure that fuel from the reactor could not be reprocessed to make nuclear weapons. Saddam was hoping he could get a better deal out of France.

Jacques Chirac sent an arms negotiation team to Iraq on March 12, 1975, who offered up to 72 of the then state-of-the-art Mirage jet fighters, as well as 40 German Dornier jets (West Germany, in 1975, was still under a United Nations ban on exporting weapons, imposed after WW II, and channelled their defence sales through France to undermine the UN sanction).

The French, for their part, were desperate to source cheap oil from Iraq in order to maintain their overall share of the world oil market. Saddam needed weapons and the ability to manufacture them under license in Iraq; France needed Iraqi oil. It was, noted commentators at the time, a marriage made in heaven. . .

A year later, in 1976, Saddam Hussein was pushing for chemical weapons manufacture as well. The French Prime Minister again helped out, opening doors for Iraq in the United States. Because of its reputation for supporting terrorism, Iraq was on the US banned list, but by going through France it was hoping to bypass US restrictions. The "personal friend" of M’sieur Chirac was introduced to a French engineering company with a subsidiary branch in the US. That branch called on a New York chemical equipment company, Pfaudler & Co, and told them Iraq needed to build a pesticide factory because "Iraqi farmers are unable to protect their crops from the ravages of desert locusts and other pests".

This seemed like a reasonable request, and Pfaudler sent staff to Iraq to begin work on the project. The US company pulled out of the deal several months later when it became apparent that Iraq wanted to manufacture 1,200 tonnes of Amiton, Demeton, Paraoxon and Parathion – highly toxic organic compounds that can be converted into nerve gas. . .

Having constructed its "pesticides" factory, Iraq began purchasing raw materials for it in July 1983. The first shipment, 500 tonnes of thiodiglycol – an ingredient of mustard gas – was sourced through a Dutch company, which went on to supply many hundreds of tonnes more. The Dutch company acted as a ‘front’, ordering the chemicals in from the US. That particular deception wasn’t discovered by US authorities until 1986, three years after the first chemical weapons had been used by Iraqi forces against Iran. But US intelligence agencies had acted swiftly after the first gas attacks in December 1983, and a report to the US Government in early 1984 recommended the immediate imposition of export controls on chemicals that could be used in weapons. Iraq and Iran were the first on the banned list, but the warring nations went through so many middlemen that eventually the banned list included the entire world, save for 18 Western nations.

The report also relates some accounts of torture and rape under the Saddam regime--for the strong-willed only.