29th March 2003, 6:00 PM
That is just false. Unquestionably. When the Iranian Revolution of 1979 hit, and the radical Shia Muslims took over and held those hostages, our support for Iran (who under the previous brutal dictator we had supported) stopped and our support for Sadaam's Iraq started in just a few years... I've seen pictures of Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with Sadaam from the '80s when we were giving them all kinds of weapons and ignoring the clear evidence that in that war, Iraq was using chemical weapons on the Iranians. Why? Because Sadaam was losing and we thought that the only way to stop the spread of Iranian revolutionary doctrine was Sadaam. So we funded him and ignored his atrocities and war crimes. And you know what he did after drawing out that war? Yeah, invaded Kuwait. With lots of Russian matiriel, true, but also some US stuff...
Since the Gulf War, we of course haven't funded Iraq while some Russian companies (governmental support is uncertain) and other Middle Eastern nations have... but the fact remains, Sadaam is still using some US materiel from when we were funding him... I heard that when they found some caches of weapons a lot of gas masks and stuff were of American manufacture and probably from before the first Gulf War...
Since the Gulf War, we of course haven't funded Iraq while some Russian companies (governmental support is uncertain) and other Middle Eastern nations have... but the fact remains, Sadaam is still using some US materiel from when we were funding him... I heard that when they found some caches of weapons a lot of gas masks and stuff were of American manufacture and probably from before the first Gulf War...