the fact of the matter is that the Reagan administration turned a willful blind eye to Saddam's use of chemical weapons against Iran because he was gassing OUR enemies. The republican administration continued to be unconcerned when Saddam used them against the Kurds.
There is no real proof that Reagan personally knew of Saddams planned use of chem. weapons.....
The CIA was giving Saddam intelligence on Iran's troop movements as they were supposed to and if they knew or suspected Saddam was going to use
chem weapons it certainly didn't stop from from supplying him with intelligence....
we certainly knew he possessed chem. weapons and used them as early as 1983 and it was believed he
probably would again...that also does not mean that
he would
definitely use them in 1988....but the conclusion can be made that we didn't really care very much....
Iraq's chem wmd...
The know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam's regime from foreign sources. The largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were in Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons) One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq The Singapore -based firm Kim Al-Khaleej, affiliated to the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq. Dieter Backfisch, managing director of West German company Karl Kolb GmbH, was quoted by saying in 1989: "For people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad "
NEW YORK TIMES
Excerpts From the President's Speech to the U.N.
Published: September 27, 1988
Poison gas. Chemical warfare. Mr. Secretary General, distinguished delegates, the terror of it. The horror of it. We condemn it. The use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war -beyond its tragic human toll - jeopardizes the moral and legal strictures that have held those weapons in check since World War I. Let this tragedy spark reaffirmation of the Geneva protocol outlawing the use of chemical weapons. I call upon the signatories to that protocol, as well as other concerned states, to convene a conference to consider actions that we can take together to reverse the serious erosion of this treaty. And we urge all nations to cooperate in negotiating a verifiable, truly global ban on chemical weapons at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
It is incumbent upon all civilized nations to ban, once and for all and on a verifiable and global basis, the use of chemical and gas warfare.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Idiot liberal partisans might note...
George Bernard Shaw said: "Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance."
http://tinyurl.com/kxzbej6