Long before the recent U.S./British invasion of Iraq, the charge that the Saddam Hussein regime had produced and used chemical weapons (such as mustard gas, VX and sarin), had the capability of producing biological weapons and was seeking to develop nuclear weapons has been bandied about by the imperialists to justify their unrelenting persecution of Iraq. This was the excuse for the whole charade of United Nations inspection and more than a decade of murderous UN “sanctions” which killed over a million Iraqi children. During the 1990s, the UNSCOM “inspectors” were shot through with U.S. agents, who planted surveillance devices and sent back espionage data to Washington on Iraq’s defenses. As we have emphasized, Hussein’s Iraq had every right to procure or develop any weapon needed to defend the country against the imperialist onslaught, and expulsion of the “UN”/U.S. spies was more than justified. When UN inspectors were readmitted last year, they failed to uncover any CBW (chemical and biological warfare) weapons at all and stated that everything indicated the Iraqi nuclear program had been shut down over a decade ago. Thereupon, Bush and Blair simply went ahead and ordered the attack anyway. 

But beyond the bottomless hypocrisy and bushels of lies from Washington and London, for years the imperialists actively supplied Iraq with chemical and biological agents, built the factories to produce CBW arms, fed Baghdad intelligence data on where to use them, and dispatched agents to the battlefields to check up on their usage. Hussein’s regime did possess and use chemical weapons against the Iranian army during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. This was a bloody slaughter between two reactionary capitalist regimes in which the workers and oppressed did not have a side. The Reagan administration in Washington early on backed Hussein’s Iraq in order to block the spread of Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Islamic Revolution”; then toward the end of the nine-year carnage, the U.S. secretly aided both sides in a cynical effort to produce a battlefield stalemate. Bits and pieces of information about the United States’ deep involvement in Iraq’s use of chemical weapons occasionally seep into the bourgeois press, but these snippets are quickly buried and the dots are not connected to show the whole picture. 

After Baghdad’s initial successes in the war with Iran, Tehran launched “human wave” attacks with tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers overrunning Iraqi positions. The focus of these attacks was the Fao Peninsula, the spit of land south of the Shatt al-Arab (the river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates), which is Iraq’s only access to the sea. Washington was worried that if Khomeini’s legions could storm across that narrow corridor, they could break into the vital oil-producing area of the Persian Gulf emirates and eastern Saudi Arabia (whose population is heavily Shiite). With a third the population of Iran, Iraq could not afford such heavy losses. As a last-ditch measure, Hussein began using poison gas. Last year when the Bush administration began citing Iraq’s use of gas in the war with Iran as an argument for “regime change” in Baghdad, the New York Times (18 August 2002) published an article revealing that: “A covert American program during the Reagan administration provided Iraq with critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence agencies knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program.”

It was long known that the U.S. supplied Iraq with satellite photography of the deployment of Iranian forces. But now the Times revealed a “highly classified program in which more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq.” DIA operative Lt. Col. Rick Francona reported directly from the battlefield on Iraqi use of nerve gas. The senior DIA official at the time, Col. Walter Lang, said the U.S. was “desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose” the war with Iran. “The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern,” he said. The Pentagon “wasn't so horrified by Iraq’s use of gas,” said another veteran of the program. “It was just another way of killing people – whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference.” But the Times article neglected to mention that the U.S. not only knew Iraq was using chemical weapons, but it also supplied the precursor chemicals to produce them as well as “starter strains” for biological weapons. 

Rumsfeld’s Handshake with Hussein

Documents declassified in recent months revealed that by November 1983, Secretary of State George Shultz was receiving intelligence reports that the Iraqis were resorting to “almost daily use of CW” against the Iranians and that “Iraq has acquired a CW production capability, primarily from Western firms, including possibly a U.S. foreign subsidiary.”¹  Yet simultaneously Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 114 (26 November 1983) which declared that the U.S. would regard “any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West.” It was decided to reestablish diplomatic relations with Hussein. For this purpose, none other than Donald Rumsfeld (who had been secretary of war in the previous Republican administration of Gerald Ford) was dispatched to Baghdad in December 1983 where he cordially met with the Iraqi strongman (see photo) and informed him of Washington’s new attitude. Rumsfeld was not a government official at the time but emphasized the importance of this “direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein.” 

Among other things, Rumsfeld pushed a project for a pipeline from Iraq to the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan, next to Israel, to be built by Bechtel Corp, Shultz’s former company. Rumsfeld was back in Baghdad in March 1984, meeting with Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz the very day the UN cited Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran; again he pushed the pipeline plan and offered Israeli support, to no avail (see Institute for Policy Studies, Crude Vision [March 2003]). In the wake of the U.S. invasion, Israel has raised the issue of a Baghdad-Haifa pipeline, and Bechtel (once headed again by Shultz) is in line to get the contract (London Guardian, 20 April). Accompanying Rumsfeld was National Security Council official Howard Teicher. In a sworn court affidavit in 1995, Teicher wrote that the United States “actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required” (quoted in Washington Post, 30 December 2002). That weaponry included cluster bombs, supplied by a Chilean company at the CIA’s request.

It was not just “third country” sales. The Post article cited a $1.5 million order for pesticide chemicals from Dow Chemical, notorious for its production of napalm and Agent Orange for use in Vietnam. Approval was granted even though the export control officer noted that these chemicals would cause “death by asphyxiation.”  That was not all that U.S. companies supplied. In an article titled “Anthrax for Export” (Progressive Magazine, April 1998), William Blum noted that “private American suppliers, licensed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, exported a witch’s brew of biological and chemical materials to Iraq,” including bacillus anthracis, clostridium botulinum and dozens of other pathogenic biological agents. This was detailed in a staff report for U.S. senator Don Riegle of the Senate Committee on Banking on “U.S. Chemical and Biological Warfare-Related Dual Use Exports to Iraq” (7 October 1994). The report notes that these deadly organisms “were not attenuated or weakened and were capable of reproduction,” and it adds: “It was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the United States were identical to those the United Nations inspectors found and removed from the Iraqi biological warfare program.”

So UN inspectors “found” exactly what the U.S. firms sent to Iraq with the permission of the U.S. government – some discovery! Yet to this day the New York Times (14 April), while admitting that the means for making Iraq’s chemical weapons “came primarily from Western companies years ago,” pretends that: “The data reveals that firms in Germany and France outstripped all others in selling the most important thing – specialized chemical-industry equipment that is particularly useful for producing poison gas.”  So it’s supposedly the perfidious French and Germans at it again! But wait. Explaining an accompanying map, which lists no American firms, the writers state, “The countries of origin are compiled based on the exporter, not the manufacturer, because it was the exporter who decided to sell a sensitive item to Iraq.” So if the U.S. manufacturer exports it to Germany or France for re-export in order to evade U.S. export controls, as regularly occurred, or sends it via its own German or French subsidiary, for the Times this counts as a French or German export! This piece, from the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on non-proliferation, is the U.S. war propaganda machine at work again.

Fallujah 2: Britain’s Dirty Secret

In fact, not only did Monsanto and Dow Chemical and dozens of U.S. laboratories supply Iraq with materials for chemical and biological weapons, with full approval of the Department of Commerce, but the very industrial plants cited today by U.S. and British leaders as supposed proof that Iraq has “weapons of mass destruction” were built for Hussein with full knowledge that they could be used to produce CW arms. A case in point is the Fallujah 2 plant 80 km. outside of Baghdad. Spy satellite photos of the plant identifying it as a chemical weapons site were published by the CIA, and Colin Powell featured it in arguing for an invasion of Iraq at the UN Security Council in February. The same plant figured prominently in last September’s dossier by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, which claimed that the plant (rebuilt after the 1991 Gulf War) was “formerly associated with the chemical warfare programme.” What Blair didn’t say, but the London Guardian (6 March) later revealed, was that the Fallujah plant was exported to Iraq by a British subsidiary of a German company, after approval by Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet over internal objections that it could be used to produce CW arms.

The Guardian exposé, titled “Britain’s Dirty Secret” shows that “British ministers knew at the time that the £14 million plant, called Falluja 2, was likely to be used for mustard and nerve gas production.” A Foreign Officer minister objected to the sale, but he was overruled by the trade minister in line with London’s policy of backing Hussein against Iran. The plant was built in 1985 by Uhde Ltd., a British subsidiary of Uhde, GmbH of Dortmund, which in turn was a subsidiary of the German chemical giant Hoechst. Not only did the British government approve the deal, it granted an export credit guarantee and eventually paid Uhde (now owned by Thyssen-Krupp) £300,000 when Iraqi payments were interrupted by the Gulf War. If Fallujah did produce chemical weapons before 1990, the responsibility is to be laid squarely on the doorstep of the British prime minister’s residence at No. 10 Downing Street. 

Whether this was ever a poison gas plant is another question. Repeated UN inspections since last November reported that the plant was inactive. The plant formerly produced chlorine, which can be used to produce epichlorohydrin (a precursor to mustard) or phosphorus trichloride (a precursor of nerve gas). Yet chlorine is the key chemical for water purification, which is what Baghdad said it was used for. The Foreign Office argument in 1985 was that Iraq already had enough chlorine plants. But after the Gulf War, Iraq’s entire chlorine production capacity was destroyed, and the U.S. deliberately targeted Iraqi waterworks. The resulting contaminated water supply produced massive sickness and disease. The Fallujah plant’s chlorine was desperately needed for water purification, and there is not a shred of evidence it was used for anything else in the last decade. Yet under UN sanctions, the U.S. refused to allow any import of materials for chlorine production. The Iraqi people paid the price with hundreds of thousands of deaths.

¹These documents can be found on the Internet in the briefing book “Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984” (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/index.htm) on the site of the National Security Archive, a private group which has obtained large quantities of documentation of the American government’s skullduggery around the world.

“Fifteen years ago, Saddam Hussein's regime ordered a chemical weapons attack on a village in Iraq called Halabja. With that single order, the regime killed thousands of Iraq’s Kurdish citizens. Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending from the sky. Many who managed to survive still suffer from cancer, blindness, respiratory diseases, miscarriages, and severe birth defects among their children. The chemical attack on Halabja – just one of 40 targeted at Iraq’s own people – provided a glimpse of the crimes Saddam Hussein is willing to commit, and the kind of threat he now presents to the entire world. He is among history’s cruelest dictators, and he is arming himself with the world's most terrible weapons.”

“Most of the casualties in Halabjah were reportedly caused by cyangen chloride. This agent has never been used by Iraq, but Iran has shown interest in it. Mustard gas casualties in the town were probably caused by Iraqi weapons because Iran has never been noted using that agent.”

   

“The truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

“I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.”

“The many crimes of Hussein are the crimes of the imperialists who backed him. And it will take revolution by the Iraqi workers, Sunni and Shi’ite alike, mobilized independently of and against the imperialist aggressors, to put an end to the likes of Hussein and his former patrons.”

VII. The Bush Gang and Chemical Weapons

The cynicism of Washington’s claims that it had to invade Iraq because of the Saddam Hussein regime’s hypothetical possession of chemical and biological weapons is underscored by the fact that, not only does the U.S. have huge stocks of such weapons, possibly the largest in the world, but the Bush regime has consistently opposed international conventions outlawing possession and use of CW weapons! In November 2001, U.S. representatives at a United Nations conference on the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention mounted a publicity operation to “name and shame” countries it claims were violating the treaty. Tops on the list were Iraq, North Korea and “probably Iran.” As the Iraqi delegate rightly noted, this stunt meant the U.S. was “envisaging Iraq as a target, a second target for an attack” after Afghanistan.  Yet only months beforehand, in July 2001, the chief U.S. negotiator walked out of a session preparing a protocol aimed at strengthening monitoring of the BWC. Washington’s rejection of the protocol led to its demise. Many people wondered why. 

Among the reasons given by the Bush administration was that it opposed international inspection or even disclosure of American bioweapons facilities. The U.S. had long claimed it had terminated all work on biological arms in 1969, but a couple of months after its dramatic walkout, the New York Times (4 September 2001) revealed that Washington was developing new germ weapons: the Defense Department built a small germ weapons plant at the Nevada nuclear test site; the Central Intelligence Agency developed a cluster bomb designed to disperse bomblets that would release germs in a mist; a Department of Energy program is testing the aerosol dispersal of “simulants,” while its budget indicates plans to test “actual agents” (i.e., weaponized germs); and the Defense Intelligence Agency has been seeking to produce a more powerful strain of anthrax. The DOD, DOE, CIA and DIA programs are only the ones which have been leaked to the public. Beyond these specific projects, a number of scientists are now asking if “perhaps the United States rejected the protocol not just because it is conducting secret, offensively oriented ‘biodefense’ programs, but because it is committed to continuing and expanding them” (see “Back to Bioweapons?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January-February 2003). 

As for chemical weapons, U.S. war propaganda made much of the fact that Iraq didn’t sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, negotiated in 1993. What Washington’s disinformation mills didn’t mention is that the present inhabitants of the White House fought tooth and nail against U.S. ratification of the CWC. At Senate hearings in April 1997, the speakers against the treaty banning chemical weapons included former (and present) secretary of war Donald Rumsfeld; former secretary of war (and current vice president) Dick Cheney; former deputy assistant (presently assistant) secretary of war Douglas Feith; and former assistant secretary of war (who was until recently chairman and is still a member of the Defense Policy Board) Richard Perle. Another prominent opponent of the CWC was the former deputy under (presently under) secretary of war Dov Zakheim. This is precisely the gang of left-over hard-line Cold Warriors that has been pushing the U.S. war drive against Iraq, using the pretext that Saddam Hussein has, or had, or was trying to get, or had the materials to make, chemical weapons but was resisting international inspections of Iraqi facilities. Yet the main argument these war hawks made against the CWC is that it would open the U.S. to the kind of inspections to which they were subjecting Iraq!

Israel's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program

But there was another reason behind their objections to the Chemical Weapons Convention. In Rumsfeld’s Senate testimony he complained that the CWC “could conceivably disarm democratic, friendly, non aggressive nations, that either do not have chemical weapons, or if they have them would be most unlikely to use them against us” (Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings, 8 April 1997). And who might that be? The answer is immediately obvious: Israel. These are all prominent members of the Zionist lobby in Washington: Feith was a campaign advisor for Israeli right-wing premier Benyamin Netanyahu; together with Perle was a co-author of the June 1996 policy paper “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” calling for Israeli domination of the Near East; Perle, Rumsfeld, Feith, Zakheim along with Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz and other current Bush administration officials jointly wrote a letter to then president Bill Clinton in February 1998 demanding that his bombing of Baghdad (Operation Desert Fox) be turned into full-scale war for “regime change” in Iraq. 

Note also that while Israel signed the CWC, it has not ratified it. Why? As the Federation of American Scientists tersely noted, “Israel has nuclear and chemical weapons, and an offensive BW program.” A big one.

We have written of the Israeli nuclear program, which includes hundreds of nuclear weapons and delivery systems capable of striking every country in the Near East (and the former Soviet Union), and whose scope has been known since it was revealed by the courageous Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu in 1986 (see “Free Mordechai Vanunu!” The Internationalist No. 14, September-October 2002). A corner of the cloak of secrecy covering the Zionist regime’s chemical and biological weapons program was lifted as a result of the 1992 crash of an El Al cargo jet after takeoff from Schipol Airport in the Netherlands when it hit an Amsterdam apartment block, killing 47. Men in white suits were seen sifting through the debris. Up to 2,000 residents and firemen later reported health complaints. Six years later, the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad (30 September 1998) published a cargo manifest showing that the flight was carrying 800 kilograms of depleted uranium and the chemicals to make 190 liters of the nerve gas sarin. It was destined for the Israeli Institute of Biological Research at Nes Ziona. A biologist formerly associated with the IIBR told the London Times (4 October 1998): “There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon...which is not manufactured at the institute.”

Given how the Israeli authorities reacted to Vanunu’s revelations (kidnapping him and imprisoning incommunicado for the last 17 years), it’s clear that the Zionist state and its defenders will go to great lengths to prevent any inspection of its chemical and bioweapons programs.