LONDON: When it comes to demonizing Saddam Hussein, nothing captures the popular imagination in America better than the statement that ‘he gassed his own people’. This is an allusion to the deployment of chemical weapons by Iraq’s military in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war, and then in the territory administered by the Tehran-backed Kurdish rebels after the ceasefire five months later.

As Iraq’s use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate’s attempt to penalize Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally — a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet played themselves out fully.

Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system — but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly.

That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq’s use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times on August 18. “After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao Peninsula, a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,” wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times.

Two years earlier it was with the aim of recapturing the Fao Peninsula, taken by the Iranians in February, that Saddam’s military used chemical agents so extensively that the UN Security Council stopped accepting its routine denials. Following an examination of 700 Iranian casualties, UN experts concluded that Baghdad had deployed mustard and nerve gases many times.

Instead of condemning Baghdad for this, the Security Council, dominated by Washington and Moscow, both pro-Iraq, coupled its condemnation of Baghdad with its disapproval of ‘the prolongation of the war’ by Tehran, for refusing a truce until the council had named Iraq the aggressor.

Despite its repeated reiteration of neutrality, the US had all along been pro-Baghdad.

Starting in July 1986, aided by the Pentagon, which clandestinely seconded its air force officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts, Saddam’s air force greatly improved its targeting accuracy, striking relentlessly the enemy’s power plants, factories and bridges, and extending the range of its strikes to Iran’s oil terminals in the lower Gulf. Under the rubric of escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers, the US built up an armada in the Gulf, which clashed with the small, under-equipped Iranian navy and sank two Iranian offshore oil platforms in the lower Gulf in retaliation for Iran’s missile attack on an American-flagged supertanker docked in Kuwaiti waters.

Against this background Iraq started hitting Tehran with its upgraded Scud ground-to-ground missiles in late February 1988. To retake Halabja from Iran and its Kurdish allies, who had captured it in March, Iraq’s air force attacked it with poison gas bombs. The objective was to take out the occupying Iranian troops, and instead the assault killed 3,200 to 5,000 civilians. The images of men, woman and children, frozen in instant death, relayed by the Iranian media, shocked the world. Yet no condemnation came from Washington. It was only when, following the ceasefire with Iran in August, Saddam made widespread use of chemical agents to recapture 4,000 square miles controlled by the Kurdish insurgents that the Security Council decided to dispatch a team to find out if Baghdad had resorted to chemical arms. Saddam refused to co-operate.

But instead of pressuring him to reverse his stand, or face a ban on the sale of American military equipment and advanced technology to Iraq by the revival of the Senate’s bill, US Secretary of State George Shultz chose to say only that interviews with the Kurdish refugees in Turkey, and ‘other sources’ (which remained obscure), pointed towards Iraqi use of chemical agents.

That was the end of the story — until the hawks in the Bush administration recently began bandying about the revolting phrase of ‘gassing his own people’ for their partisan ends.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.