Eric Margolis's article is literally and figuratively sickening:
While covering Iraq in 1990 – just before the first massive US bombing campaign – I discovered the US and Britain had secretly built a germ weapons arsenal for Iraq to use against Iran in the eight year-Iran-Iraq War.
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Iraq had no nuclear weapons, as the US falsely claimed. But it did have an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons – delivered by the western powers. All were battlefield arms, not strategic, weapons. None could be delivered more than 100 kms.
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But what I uncovered in Baghdad was far worse.
I found two British scientists who had been employed at Iraq’s top secret Salman Pak chemical and biowarfare laboratory near Baghdad. The Brits confided to me they were part of a large technical team secretly organized and “seconded” to Iraq in the mid-1980’s by the British government and the MI6 Secret Intelligence Service. Their goal was to develop and “weaponize” anthrax, plague, botulism and other pathogens for use as tactical germ weapons.
The US and Saudi Arabia feared Iran’s Islamic revolution would sweep the Mideast and overthrow its oil monarchs. So Washington and its Arab allies convinced Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, to invade Iran and overthrow its new government. Arms and money flowed to Iraq from the US, Britain, Kuwait and the Saudis.
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So the US and Britain supplied Saddam Hussein with chemical and biological weapons to break the waves of attacking Iranians. Chemical warfare manufacturing equipment – disguised as insecticide plants – came from Germany, France and Holland. The feed stock for the germ weapons came from a US laboratory in Maryland –approved by the US government.
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Few Americans know anything about their nation’s support for the demonized Saddam Hussein or the secret biological weapons story. Or that the deadliest biowarfare weapon used in the region was the destruction by the US airpower of Iraq’s water and sewage systems, a crime that led to the deaths, according to UN officials, of over 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, from contaminated water. Iraq is still poisoned by depleted uranium munitions fired by US forces.
The Western powers prevented Iraq from importing chlorine to purify filthy, pest-ridden water, claiming the chlorine could be used in chemical weapons! Lead for school pencils was also banned as a possible nuclear plant component. This from the same nations that had been covertly supplying Iraq with germs and poison gas for use against Iran.
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. - Carl Sagan