Ron Paul Rewind: ‘Do Not Attack Iraq!’ (2002)
On the eve of President Bush’s war on Iraq, as the House debated the authorization for the use of force that it ultimately gave the president, then-Rep. Ron Paul stood up to oppose the coming war from every possible angle. The process was wrong; the precedent set by launching a pre-emptive war would come back to haunt us; the age-old Christian “Just War” doctrine had not been met, thus the war was immoral; the war would cost a fortune; and so on.
He tried every approach to get his colleagues to listen.With the rapid fall of Iraq to an al-Qaeda affiliated army, the ISIS, in progress this week — an al-Qaeda that did not exist in Iraq before the invasion — we can look back and wish that the rest of the Congress and the president had listened to Ron Paul’s warnings and pleas…
At some point, history will be very kind to Dr. Paul.
Iraqi Air Force evacuating besieged American contractors –
“A U.S. contractor in Iraq told WND the Iraqi Air Force has begun evacuations from Balad Air Force Base, where 200 American contractors were trapped by the al-Qaida-inspired jihadists who have seized control of two cities and are now threatening Baghdad.
…private contractors who have recently returned to the U.S. from Iraq said their former colleagues effectively had been abandoned by the U.S. military and were fighting for their lives against an army of jihadists surrounding the base who belong to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.”
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“History” has already justified Dr. Paul in every single respect, no exceptions. BC-LR to all
Still like RP…even though he has a large PAC that employs most of his family….that one I didn’t expect .
RP never stood a chance against the military complex muscle machine, puppet mastering the decision makers. Couple that with a voting population that is generally only interested in their own little here and now, and the rest is history.
Been watching news and videos coming from Iraq. People are being rounded up and shot to death for the whole world to see.People getting killed just walking down the street. I think we are getting a look at what life is going to be like in this country after economic collapse. Best be armed and ready to fight.Plan ,Prepare, Prep .
The fact the US is still following the PNAC plan after all these idiotic wars/attacks, overthrows of elected governments, with no one in prison for war crimes, proves to me beyond a shadow of doubt that the coup that stole the 2000 election is STILL IN CHARGE. The players change, but never the “game”.
These bastards look at recent developments as another way to profit. And that’s it.
Pb said: “People are being rounded up and shot to death for the whole world to see.People getting killed just walking down the street. I think we are getting a look at what life is going to be like in this country after economic collapse.”
Yeah, Detroit’s a pretty rough town. If Obama had a city, it would look like it.
I am not a libertarian, but I agree with Ron Paul’s position on war. I believe that Yinon Zionism, or Clean Break regime change drove the neocons to war. This was a new world order war. The dark side of Globalization took over.
Millions of folks knew this. RP was not a lone wolf. Perhaps he was the lone politician, tho.
I opposed invading Iraq and I agree that the Christian “Just” war doctrine was not met and now we all are going to pay the price for unjust foolishness.
Ron Paul: Give Iraq Nothing
Jihadi blitz is like the Tet Offensive, Paul says, and it’s time to stop helping Iraq’s government.
By Steven Nelson
June 13, 2014 | 3:30 p.m. EDT
As jihadi rebels advance toward Baghdad after capturing much of Iraq’s north, former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, says America’s chickens are coming home to roost and the U.S. should provide absolutely no assistance to the Iraqi government.
“Give them nothing,” the former presidential candidate advises. “The people in that country have to deal with it.”
The Iraqi government is appealing for U.S. assistance as the crisis deepens and President Barack Obama said Friday he’s reviewing options short of on-the-ground help, while expressing irritation about the Iraqi government’s ineptitude.
Paul’s glad that troops are off the table – but fears airstrikes or aid would harm U.S. interests.
[RELATED: How U.S. Counterterrorism Goes All Wrong]
“The president should not be sending weapons or training forces, all that would do is give more incentive for al-Qaida to be more active,” he tells U.S. News. “We’ve suffered enough and we don’t suffer at the hands of those who are defending their country, we suffer at the hand of those who have orchestrated this foreign policy that’s doomed to fail.”
Troops from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an al-Qaida offshoot active in the Syrian Civil War, seized Fallujah in western Iraq in January and this week conquered Mosul in northern Iraq, one of the country’s largest cities, as Iraqi soldiers fled. The militants are proceeding south along the Tigris River toward Baghdad, taking several important towns already.
“It reminds me little bit of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam – it was such a surprise, they thought the war was over and the Tet Offensive showed they were so strong that they struck all the cities, and they lost every battle, but they ended up winning the war,” Paul says. “But [in Iraq] they’re winning the battles, so that’s an ominous sign and for our national security’s sake we should just get out of there.”
[SURVEY: Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan Most Likely to Want Sharia]
Paul generated an enthusiastic fan base toward the end of George W. Bush’s presidency by aggressively criticizing the Iraq War, which Bush launched in 2003. He unsuccessfully sought the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 and 2012, campaigning for a noninterventionist foreign policy.
U.S. troops left Iraq in December 2011, but a large American embassy remains.
Paul blames U.S. policies for Iraq’s instability. “We have for 10 years been bombing Iraq and just stirring up trouble and hatred and chaos; Saddam Hussein was a brute but at least he didn’t murder Christians and cause so much killing,” he says. “We have created a monster.”
ISIS is infamous for beheading, crucifying and otherwise murdering opponents, alleged criminals and religious minorities in Syria, where it is one of several militant groups seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Sunni Muslim group aspires to create a transnational Islamic caliphate spanning Iraq and Syria.
[EARLIER: U.S. Selling Missiles, Drones to Iraq Amid Spreading Violence]
“They’re capturing our weapons in Iraq and even in Syria we support the people trying to overthrow Assad, and they end up with our weapons and we end up being allies with al-Qaida,” the former congressman says.
Iran, an ally of the Shiite-led government in Iraq, is supporting Assad in Syria and has reportedly deployed troops to shore up Iraq’s government.
“We have a choice: Should we work real hard to preserve a government [in Iraq] that may become a very, very close ally with Iran, or should we throw our support with al-Qaida, which we have done in the past?” Paul says. “I don’t want to pick between the two.”
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken
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The mission of morons fully accomplished
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American exceptionalism i.e. my tyrant is better than your tyrant.
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I’m sure somewhere in the 9th circle of hell, Saddam is bent over double , laughing hysterically.
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And, to think that even after the blatant lies told at the cost of trillions of US taxpayer dollars,the loss of over 4 thousand American soldiers lives and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, and the destruction of the entire infascture of an innocent peoples’ nation , there are those who still think this POS drunken frat boy Dubya Bush a great American…sheesh…the stupid , it burns.
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Hmmm. Several people here, led by the irrepressible flash, suffer from a severe malady known as “selective memory.” Let’s consider ….
Saddam Hussein launched a horrible, protracted war with Iran and used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. An estimated total 1,000,000 deaths resulted.
Saddam Hussein did engage in chemical warfare against those pesky Kurds in northern Iraq. Thousands of innocent women and children died as a result. The Kurds prevailed.
Saddam Hussein did invade Kuwait on the pretext that it was Iraq’s “19th Province.” Many more thousands died, mostly Kuwaitis.
Saddam Hussein did launch dirty rockets laden with chemicals into Saudi Arabia and Israel after Bush the Elder put together the Desert Storm Operation to liberate Kuwait.
Saddam Hussein, throughout his reign, did suppress any and all Iraqi Shiite resistence to his dictatorship. Documents presented at his trial indicted that tens of thousands of Shiites were brutally executed or murdered by Iraqi troops. Again, this included many innocent women and children residing in Shiite villages where unrest was detected.
All of this has been soundly documented. Yet somehow it prompts a response like a photo of Saddam Hussein with the title “Miss Me Yet?”
Well, no, I don’t miss him.
Hey SSS
You somewhat conveniently forgot who was arming and supporting Hussein in his war with Iran.
Who provided the gas that killed the Kurds?
Any guesses CIA boy?
But Saddam didn’t do this
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Destroy an entire nation, get thousands of Americans killed, tens of thousands more wounded, maimed, and psychological basket cases, and millions of dead and wounded Iraqi people. You can thank America for that.
We sure taught him a lesson!!
Obama’s Iraq Debacle
By Rich Lowry June 13, 2014
Mario has an excellent piece on the home page on how President Obama’s policy of passivity in Syria and Iraq has created the premise for a catastrophe in Iraq and a broader regional meltdown. He mentions this Dexter Filkins report in The New Yorker, which is worth reading in full. Its account of how we ended up with no troops in Iraq is particularly valuable and worth quoting at length, given the spin of the administration’s supporters that there was no deal to be had to keep a presence there. The story is complicated, but it’s clear the administration had no real interest in staying and trying to preserve the fragile stability we had fought so hard to achieve:
The leaders of all the major Iraqi parties had privately told American commanders that they wanted several thousand military personnel to remain, to train Iraqi forces and to help track down insurgents. The commanders told me that Maliki, too, said that he wanted to keep troops in Iraq. But he argued that the long-standing agreement that gave American soldiers immunity from Iraqi courts was increasingly unpopular; parliament would forbid the troops to stay unless they were subject to local law.
President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis—like how many troops they wanted to leave behind—because the Administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the President was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama Administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said.
The last American combat troops departed Iraq on December 18, 2011. Some U.S. officials believe that Maliki never intended to allow soldiers to remain; in a recent e-mail, he denied ever supporting such a plan, saying, “I am the owner of the idea of withdrawing the U.S. troops.” Many Iraqi and American officials are convinced that even a modest force would have been able to prevent chaos—not by fighting but by providing training, signals intelligence, and a symbolic presence. “If you had a few hundred here, not even a few thousand, they would be coöperating with you, and they would become your partners,” Askari told me. “But, when they left, all of them left. There’s no one to talk to about anything.”
Although the White House denies it, we lost almost all of our influence:
“We used to restrain Maliki all the time,” Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, the deputy commander in Iraq until January, 2011, told me. “If Maliki was getting ready to send tanks to confront the Kurds, we would tell him and his officials, ‘We will physically block you from moving if you try to do that.’ ” Barbero was angry at the White House for not pushing harder for an agreement. “You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,” he said. “Now we have no leverage in Iraq. Without any troops there, we’re just another group of guys.” There is no longer anyone who can serve as a referee, he said, adding, “Everything that has happened there was not just predictable—we predicted it.”
Indeed, months before the election, American diplomats in Iraq sent a rare dissenting cable to Washington, complaining that the U.S., with its combination of support and indifference, was encouraging Maliki’s authoritarian tendencies. “We thought we were creating a dictator,” one person who signed the memo told me.
Sure enough, as soon as we were gone, the downward spiral began:
Less than twenty-four hours after the last convoy of American fighters left, Maliki’s government ordered the arrest of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, the highest-ranking Sunni Arab.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/380409/obamas-iraq-debacle-rich-lowry
“Saddam Hussein, throughout his reign, did suppress any and all Iraqi Shiite resistence to his dictatorship” ———– SSS
Sure am glad we fucked him up. And we did it the right way.
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Who the hell cares what happens in Iraq? Whoever ends up as chief thief-in-charge will keep the oil flowing. BC-LR to all
@ Stucky aka Neutron Star
Everything I stated happened BEFORE 2002, and you come sashaying onto the thread with an Abu Graib photo, which occurred AFTER 2002. How many prisoners died at Abu Graib, professor? Is the answer fucking zero?
And then there’s this from the Professor Emeritus of Disinformation, “millions of dead and wounded Iraqi people. You can thank America for that.”
Bullshit. Total bullshit. Millions=2,000,000 plus. That’s a figure of genocide proportions, dumbass. Don’t forget to subtract the tens of thousands of al Qaeda affiliated FOREIGN jihadists who died for Mohammed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war
United States support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War, against post-revolutionary Iran, included several billion dollars’ worth of economic aid, the sale of dual-use technology, non-U.S. origin weaponry, military intelligence, Special Operations training, and direct involvement in warfare against Iran.[3][4]
Support from the U.S. for Iraq was not a secret and was frequently discussed in open session of the Senate and House of Representatives. On June 9, 1992, Ted Koppel reported on ABC’s Nightline,that the “Reagan/Bush administrations permitted—and frequently encouraged—the flow of money, agricultural credits, dual-use technology, chemicals, and weapons to Iraq.”[5]
Starting in 1982 with Iranian success on the battlefield, the United States made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, normalizing relations with the government, supplying it with economic aid, counter-insurgency training, operational intelligence on the battlefield, and weapons.[3][12]
President Ronald Reagan initiated a strategic opening to Iraq, signing National Security Study Directive (NSSD) 4-82 and selecting Donald Rumsfeld as his emissary to Hussein, whom he visited in December 1983 and March 1984.[13] According to U.S. ambassador Peter W. Galbraith, far from winning the conflict, “the Reagan administration was afraid Iraq might actually lose.”[14]
In 1982, Iraq was removed from a list of State Sponsors of Terrorism to ease the transfer of dual-use technology to that country. According to investigative journalist Alan Friedman, Secretary of State Alexander Haig was “upset at the fact that the decision had been made at the White House, even though the State Department was responsible for the list.”[3] “I was not consulted,” Haig is said to have complained.
Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history — and still gave him a hand.
BY Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid
AUGUST 26, 2013
The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.
The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq’s favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration’s long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn’t disclose.
U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein’s government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture.
“The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew,” he told Foreign Policy.
According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this story.
In contrast to today’s wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein’s widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted.
In the documents, the CIA said that Iran might not discover persuasive evidence of the weapons’ use — even though the agency possessed it. Also, the agency noted that the Soviet Union had previously used chemical agents in Afghanistan and suffered few repercussions.
It has been previously reported that the United States provided tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States’ knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.
Top CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, a close friend of President Ronald Reagan, were told about the location of Iraqi chemical weapons assembly plants; that Iraq was desperately trying to make enough mustard agent to keep up with frontline demand from its forces; that Iraq was about to buy equipment from Italy to help speed up production of chemical-packed artillery rounds and bombs; and that Iraq could also use nerve agents on Iranian troops and possibly civilians.
Officials were also warned that Iran might launch retaliatory attacks against U.S. interests in the Middle East, including terrorist strikes, if it believed the United States was complicit in Iraq’s chemical warfare campaign.
“As Iraqi attacks continue and intensify the chances increase that Iranian forces will acquire a shell containing mustard agent with Iraqi markings,” the CIA reported in a top secret document in November 1983. “Tehran would take such evidence to the U.N. and charge U.S. complicity in violating international law.”
At the time, the military attaché’s office was following Iraqi preparations for the offensive using satellite reconnaissance imagery, Francona told Foreign Policy. According to a former CIA official, the images showed Iraqi movements of chemical materials to artillery batteries opposite Iranian positions prior to each offensive.
Francona, an experienced Middle East hand and Arabic linguist who served in the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he first became aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran in 1984, while serving as air attaché in Amman, Jordan. The information he saw clearly showed that the Iraqis had used Tabun nerve agent (also known as “GA”) against Iranian forces in southern Iraq.
The declassified CIA documents show that Casey and other top officials were repeatedly informed about Iraq’s chemical attacks and its plans for launching more. “If the Iraqis produce or acquire large new supplies of mustard agent, they almost certainly would use it against Iranian troops and towns near the border,” the CIA said in a top secret document.
But it was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost.
The CIA noted in one document that the use of nerve agent “could have a significant impact on Iran’s human wave tactics, forcing Iran to give up that strategy.” Those tactics, which involved Iranian forces swarming against conventionally armed Iraqi positions, had proved decisive in some battles. In March 1984, the CIA reported that Iraq had “begun using nerve agents on the Al Basrah front and likely will be able to employ it in militarily significant quantities by late this fall.”
The use of chemical weapons in war is banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which states that parties “will exert every effort to induce other States to accede to the” agreement. Iraq never ratified the protocol; the United States did in 1975. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and use of such arms, wasn’t passed until 1997, years after the incidents in question.
The initial wave of Iraqi attacks, in 1983, used mustard agent. While generally not fatal, mustard causes severe blistering of the skin and mucus membranes, which can lead to potentially fatal infections, and can cause blindness and upper respiratory disease, while increasing the risk of cancer. The United States wasn’t yet providing battlefield intelligence to Iraq when mustard was used. But it also did nothing to assist Iran in its attempts to bring proof of illegal Iraqi chemical attacks to light. Nor did the administration inform the United Nations. The CIA determined that Iran had the capability to bomb the weapons assembly facilities, if only it could find them. The CIA believed it knew the locations.
Hard evidence of the Iraqi chemical attacks came to light in 1984. But that did little to deter Hussein from using the lethal agents, including in strikes against his own people. For as much as the CIA knew about Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, officials resisted providing Iraq with intelligence throughout much of the war. The Defense Department had proposed an intelligence-sharing program with the Iraqis in 1986. But according to Francona, it was nixed because the CIA and the State Department viewed Saddam Hussein as “anathema” and his officials as “thugs.”
The situation changed in 1987. CIA reconnaissance satellites picked up clear indications that the Iranians were concentrating large numbers of troops and equipment east of the city of Basrah, according to Francona, who was then serving with the Defense Intelligence Agency. What concerned DIA analysts the most was that the satellite imagery showed that the Iranians had discovered a gaping hole in the Iraqi lines southeast of Basrah. The seam had opened up at the junction between the Iraqi III Corps, deployed east of the city, and the Iraqi VII Corps, which was deployed to the southeast of the city in and around the hotly contested Fao Peninsula.
The satellites detected Iranian engineering and bridging units being secretly moved to deployment areas opposite the gap in the Iraqi lines, indicating that this was going to be where the main force of the annual Iranian spring offensive was going to fall, Francona said.
In late 1987, the DIA analysts in Francona’s shop in Washington wrote a Top Secret Codeword report partially entitled “At The Gates of Basrah,” warning that the Iranian 1988 spring offensive was going to be bigger than all previous spring offensives, and this offensive stood a very good chance of breaking through the Iraqi lines and capturing Basrah. The report warned that if Basrah fell, the Iraqi military would collapse and Iran would win the war.
President Reagan read the report and, according to Francona, wrote a note in the margin addressed to Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci: “An Iranian victory is unacceptable.”
Subsequently, a decision was made at the top level of the U.S. government (almost certainly requiring the approval of the National Security Council and the CIA). The DIA was authorized to give the Iraqi intelligence services as much detailed information as was available about the deployments and movements of all Iranian combat units. That included satellite imagery and perhaps some sanitized electronic intelligence. There was a particular focus on the area east of the city of Basrah where the DIA was convinced the next big Iranian offensive would come. The agency also provided data on the locations of key Iranian logistics facilities, and the strength and capabilities of the Iranian air force and air defense system. Francona described much of the information as “targeting packages” suitable for use by the Iraqi air force to destroy these targets.
The sarin attacks then followed.
The nerve agent causes dizziness, respiratory distress, and muscle convulsions, and can lead to death. CIA analysts could not precisely determine the Iranian casualty figures because they lacked access to Iranian officials and documents. But the agency gauged the number of dead as somewhere between “hundreds” and “thousands” in each of the four cases where chemical weapons were used prior to a military offensive. According to the CIA, two-thirds of all chemical weapons ever used by Iraq during its war with Iran were fired or dropped in the last 18 months of the war.
By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein’s military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.
A month later, the Iraqis used aerial bombs and artillery shells filled with sarin against Iranian troop concentrations on the Fao Peninsula southeast of Basrah, helping the Iraqi forces win a major victory and recapture the entire peninsula. The success of the Fao Peninsula offensive also prevented the Iranians from launching their much-anticipated offensive to capture Basrah. According to Francona, Washington was very pleased with the result because the Iranians never got a chance to launch their offensive.
The level of insight into Iraq’s chemical weapons program stands in marked contrast to the flawed assessments, provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies about Iraq’s program prior to the United States’ invasion in 2003. Back then, American intelligence had better access to the region and could send officials out to assess the damage.
Francona visited the Fao Peninsula shortly after it had been captured by the Iraqis. He found the battlefield littered with hundreds of used injectors once filled with atropine, the drug commonly used to treat sarin’s lethal effects. Francona scooped up a few of the injectors and brought them back to Baghdad — proof that the Iraqis had used sarin on the Fao Peninsula.
In the ensuing months, Francona reported, the Iraqis used sarin in massive quantities three more times in conjunction with massed artillery fire and smoke to disguise the use of nerve agents. Each offensive was hugely successful, in large part because of the increasingly sophisticated use of mass quantities of nerve agents. The last of these attacks, called the Blessed Ramadan Offensive, was launched by the Iraqis in April 1988 and involved the largest use of sarin nerve agent employed by the Iraqis to date. For a quarter-century, no chemical attack came close to the scale of Saddam’s unconventional assaults. Until, perhaps, the strikes last week outside of Damascus.
The Halabja chemical attack (Kurdish: Kîmyabarana Helebce کیمیابارانی ھەڵەبجە), also known as the Halabja Massacre or Bloody Friday,[1] was a genocidal massacre against the Kurdish people that took place on March 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran–Iraq War in the Kurdish city of Halabja in Southern Kurdistan. The attack was part of the Al-Anfal campaign in northern Iraq, as well as part of the Iraqi attempt to repel the Iranian Operation Zafar 7. It took place 48 hours after the fall of the town to Iranian army and Kurdish guerrillas.
The attack killed between 3,200 and 5,000 people and injured 7,000 to 10,000 more, most of them civilians.[1][2] Thousands more died of complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack.[3] The incident, which has been officially defined as an act of genocide against the Kurdish people in Iraq,[4] was and still remains the largest chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history.[5]
The 2002 International Crisis Group (ICG) no. 136 “Arming Saddam: The Yugoslav Connection” concludes it was “tacit approval” by many world governments that led to the Iraqi regime being armed with weapons of mass destruction, despite sanctions, because of the ongoing Iranian conflict. Among the chemical precursors provided to Iraq from American companies such as Alcolac International and Phillips was thiodiglycol, a substance needed to manufacture mustard gas, according to leaked portions of Iraq’s “full, final and complete” disclosure of the sources for its weapons programs. The provision of chemical precursors from United States companies to Iraq was enabled by a Ronald Reagan Administration policy that removed Iraq from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Alcolac was named as a defendant in the Aziz v. Iraq case presently pending in the United States District Court (Case No. 1:09-cv-00869-MJG). Both companies have since undergone reorganization. Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum is now part of ConocoPhillips, an American oil and discount fossil fuel company. Alcolac International has since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc.[26]
The indispensable and holy nation tortures its enemies. This happened after 2002. No one died. Everything is A-OK, nothing to see here, move along.
“by the time all their calculations had settled the researchers put their “confidence interval” for possible excess deaths between March 2003 and June 2011 [as high as] 751,000.” ————————- http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/better-stab-estimating-many-died-iraq-war-68419/
The above does not take into account; deaths due to destroyed infrastructure, especially contaminated drinking water, 4 million orphans, 660,000 living in the streets, close to 2 million refugees, deaths due to horrendous nutrition, and on and on …….. all given in great detail and numerous links and references here ———–> http://web.mit.edu/humancostiraq/
The only thing our CIA spook failed to mention is “We gave Iraq Democracy! Woo Hoo!”. A destroyed nation, people living on the edge, destroyed futures, hopelessness …. nothing to see here folks. Move along. We got Saddam. That’s all that matters. We are righteous, Iraqis are not.
“You somewhat conveniently forgot who was arming and supporting Hussein in his war with Iran.
Who provided the gas that killed the Kurds?”
—-Admin
Admin’s itching for another ass-whooping, and I’m here to deliver same.
I didn’t forget a damn thing. Most of Saddam’s lethal military hardware came from the Soviet Union, and the rest came from international arms dealers. The U.S. sent non-lethal economic and military aid, such as uniforms.
Private German and French corporations were responsible for his ability to manufacture chemical weapons (nerve and mustard gas). Read and comprehend your Wiki article more carefully.
Wow. What a weak pathetic response from SSS.
Hussein was our ally in the war against Iran.
Your boy Reagan and your boys in the CIA enabled and encouraged good old Sadaam to gas those nasty evil Iranians.
They couldn’t have produced the gas without Reagan taking them off the terrorist list.
So Solly. You lose again.
Go watch Lawrence Welk and take a nap.
Regardless of who’s the blame for the current problems the West had better stop these mass murdering jihadists before they take over the southern oilfields.If they captured those oilfields the price of oil is going towards 200 dollars a barrel according to people at I B D .
This is a martyrs cemetary in Iran. Every city has one. The families of these soldiers come and picnic on the graves of their dead sons. They meet and befriend the families of other dead soldiers. Many marriages have resulted. Not all graves have a picture, of course. There are also the graves of unknown soldiers and families who do not know where their sons are buried gather there.
[img]http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&docid=mN0Dauuwioz7iM&tbnid=NmNfWE2fSy9uiM:&ved=0CAgQjRw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fandersh%2F146313262%2F&ei=nY-cU7mIKImlyATBtoLgDw&psig=AFQjCNG1QXBNTT-JGX9TAPyeTOeLbfBBcQ&ust=1402855709735584[/img]
Learned one thing anyway – Stucky’s a neocon. “Nuff said. BC-LR to all
Admin
Your lap dog Stucky is hiding in shame under his desk after I destroyed his penchant for hyperbole. He said “millions of Iraqis” died after the American invasion in 2003 and then fessed up by posting two links to articles putting the estimated, repeat, estimated figure at somewhere between 150,000 to 700,000. In other words, everyone is guessing, but it sure as shit ain’t millions.
As for you, you haven’t countered one single fact I laid out. In fact, you assert leaps of faith throughout your flash-inspired copy-and-paste performance. So what if the CIA knew about Saddam’s use of chemicals against Iran? What’s the big fucking deal? The Iranians happened to be fighting on Iraqi soil, btw. Look at a fucking map and try and locate Basra, where the attacks took place. And here’s a quote from YOUR copy-and-paste.
“The use of chemical weapons in war is banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which states that parties “will exert every effort to induce other States to accede to the” agreement. Iraq never ratified the protocol; the United States did in 1975. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and use of such arms, wasn’t passed until 1997, years after the incidents in question.”
Got that? Iraq never ratified the protocol, and enemy troops were on their soil. War is hell.
You might want to ask Avalon if there’s a soft cushion for you to sit on after this brutal spanking you just received.
@T4C – “New York Times Says “Lack Of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth”
Did you ever hear of the Report from Iron Mountain?
“In 1967, a major publisher, The Dial Press, released Report from Iron Mountain. The book claimed to be a suppressed, secret government report, written by a commission of scholars, known as the “Special Study Group”, set up in 1963, with the document itself leaked by one of its members. The Group met at an underground nuclear bunker called Iron Mountain and worked over a period of two and a half years, delivering the report in September 1966.
“The report was an investigation into the problems that the United States would need to face if and when “world peace” should be established on a more or less permanent basis. Or to quote from the “official” report: “It is surely no exaggeration to say that a condition of general world peace would lead to changes in the social structures of the nations of the world of unparalleled and revolutionary magnitude. The economic impact of general disarmament, to name only the most obvious consequence of peace, would revise the production and distribution patterns of the globe to a degree that would make the changes of the past fifty years seem insignificant. Political, sociological, cultural, and ecological changes would be equally far-reaching. What has motivated our study of these contingencies has been the growing sense of thoughtful men in and out of government that the world is totally unprepared to meet the demands of such a situation.”
http://www.philipcoppens.com/ironmountain.html
In other words–we can’t handle peace, according to the “Report”.
“Learned one thing anyway – Stucky’s a neocon.” ————- A. R. Wasem
What???????????????
Are you serious? If so, please explain.
“Your lap dog Stucky is hiding in shame under his desk “————- SSS
When have you EVER seen me hide? At 1:30 I took my dad to to a picnic hosted by the Plainfield German Singer Club …. a fascinating experience. Just got home a few minutes ago. Lap dog? I’m too tired right now. Maybe Admin will deal harshly with you.
.
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” ….after I destroyed his penchant for hyperbole. He said “millions of Iraqis” died after the American invasion in 2003 ….”
I must STRONGLY advise you to get READING GLASSES. Or, maybe take a READING COMPREHENSION course.
This is exactly what I said. Read slowly if you must; —-” … and millions of dead AND WOUNDED Iraqi people”
Did you get that? I said “AND WOUNDED”. Do I need to explain it to you?
I’m exhausted and going to bed. I might deal with you tomorrow. Once I’m rested it won’t go well for you. Your only hope at this point is to beg forgiveness and mercy.
Stucky – Sorry, I misread your last post. Serves me right for being in a hurry. Best regards – Rich
“I might deal with you tomorrow.”
—-Sticky @ SSS
Might? I’m waiting.
I just keep remembering how everyone said Ron Paul’s thinking was crazy. His foreign policy thinking wasn’t realistic. I kept thinking how he was the only intelligent person running. The only veteran also.