The (amply deserved) hanging of Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein's cousin responsible for the chemical attacks against the Kurdish town of Halabja, should be the occasion for a meaningful debate about the attitude of the Reagan administration during the Iran-Iraq war.
One should remember that Dubya and his acolytes like Condoleeza Rice tried to justify the invasion of Iraq with the argument that Saddam Hussein "gassed his own people." This was purely Orwellian DoubleSpeak, giving the fact that in 1988 George Shultz lied through his teeth blaming Iran for the attack against the unfortunate town, a strike whose Iraqi responsibility was perfectly known to the American intelligence. Actually, it has been established that the U.S. provided intelligence to the Iraqis for chemical bombing against the Faw peninsula.
One should not go further than a largely forgotten but extremely well documented piece in the New York Times to ascertain that:
"By any measure, the American record on Halabja is shameful. Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show (1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja, and (2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame. The result of this stunning act of sophistry was that the international community failed to muster the will to condemn Iraq strongly for an act as heinous as the terrorist strike on the World Trade Center. This was at a time when Iraq was launching what proved to be the final battles of the war against Iran. Its wholesale use of poison gas against Iranian troops and Iranian Kurdish towns, and its threat to place chemical warheads on the missiles it was lobbing at Tehran, brought Iran to its knees.
"
This 2003 op-ed article by Joost R. Hiltermann was later expanded into a book, "A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja." Among other things, Hiltermann wrote: "US intelligence on Iranian rearguard facilities proved critical in accurately directing Iraqi chemical strikes." This was a reference to the Faw battle, there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein needed American help to destroy a village where only civilians were present like Halabja.
However, there is ample evidence that the Reagan administration aided and abetted the Iraqi regime in his chemical warfare against the Iranian and the Kurds. This was well known in the 1980s but somehow forgotten after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Only in 2002 an article by Patrick Tyler in The New York Times brought back the issue to the public opinion.
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
.
Afterwards, more pressing issues have conveniently buried the Reagan administration financial, diplomatic and military support to Saddam Hussein. Will this be forgotten?