Iraq Peace Team Briefings are intended to isolate and explore the subtleties of the larger anti-war / anti-sanctions argument.

On March 16, 1988, Iraqi air forces bombarded Halabja, a predominantly Kurdish city in northeastern Iraq, with chemical weapons. According to Amnesty International, "some 5,000 Kurdish children and adults were killed. The slaughter...marked the beginning of the 'Anfal' campaign in which tens of thousands of Kurdish civilians lost their lives. The Iraqi Government destroyed hundreds of Kurdish villages, killing or forcibly evacuating the inhabitants or making them 'disappear.'" Fourteen years after the massacre, the people of Halabja still suffer from very high rates of serious diseases such as cancer, neurological disorders, birth defects and miscarriages.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, in a statement on the thirteenth anniversary of the Halabja attack, pointed out that the attack was not an isolated incident, reminding us that "the Iraqi regime also killed thousands of Iranians with chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War from 1983 to 1988."

What Boucher failed to mention is that the United States, desperate to prevent a victory for Iran in the decade long Iran-Iraq War, quietly provided Iraq with military aid and intelligence to give Saddam Hussein the advantage, and looked the other way when the Iraqi military started to use chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and civilians. The Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas," a veteran of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency told the New York Times recently, "It was just another way of killing people — whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference."

Of course, the United States was not alone in its unconditional support for Iraq in the 80s. The United Kingdom, France, and other Western nations also helped Iraq in to build and maintain powerful military machine inclusive of weapons of mass destruction.

The nature of the West's relationship with Iraq prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait has been the subject of several major news stories this month. We have included links to some of those stories below.

• Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas, by Paul McGeough, New York Times, August 19, 2002.
• What The New York Times Left Out, by William Blum, ZNet, August 20, 2002.
• Don't trust Bush or Blair on Iraq, by Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian of London, August 21, 2002.
• Rumsfeld Key Player in Iraq Policy Shift, by Robert Windrem, NBC News, August 18, 2002.
• The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s Closet, by Jeremy Scahill, Common Dreams, August 2, 2002.