From: "Adam Flinton" 

Nope that is mostly true. Look at the "clearance" of Iranian
forces from the Fao penisular & the fact that there was a team of US
"advisors" who did the planning & logistics for that
engagement.

How do you do planning & logistics w/o knowing what the major weapon
system whihc was used was going to be?

Had to clear em out of the Fao penisular as that was Iraq's only direct
route out to the gulf (for it's oil).

" It's long been known that the U.S. gave Iraq satellite intelligence
to prevent an Iranian victory. But the Times article includes new
information revealing the extent of U.S. involvement: "More than 60
officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] were secretly providing
detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles,
plans for airstrikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq." This
Pentagon program continued even when it became clear that the Iraqi
military "had integrated chemical weapons throughout their arsenal and
were adding them to strike plans that American advisers either prepared or
suggested." U.S. plans in fact were made knowing that Iraq would use
chemical weapons.

A DIA officer said the Pentagon "wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of
gas. It was just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or
phosgene, it didn't make any difference." Another U.S. intelligence
officer told the Times, "The use of gas on the battlefield by the
Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern.""

http://www.observer.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4492363,00.html

http://www.photius.com/rogue_nations/020818_nyt.html

http://www.rupe-india.org/34/iran.html

"

Despite its strong ties to the USSR, Iraq turned to the west for support in
the war with Iran. This it received massively. As Saddam Hussein later
revealed, the US and Iraq decided to re-establish diplomatic
relations-broken off after the 1967 war with Israel-just before Iraq's
invasion of Iran in 1980 (the actual implementation was delayed for a few
more years in order not to make the linkage too explicit). Diplomatic
relations between the US and Iraq were formally restored in 1984-well after
the US knew, and a UN team confirmed, that Iraq was using chemical weapons
against the Iranian troops. (The emissary sent by US president Reagan to
negotiate the arrangements was none other than the present US defence
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.) In 1982, the US State Department removed Iraq
from its list of "state sponsors of terrorism", and fought off
efforts by the US Congress to put it back on the list in 1985. Most
crucially, the US blocked condemnation of Iraq's chemical attacks in the UN
Security Council. The US was the sole country to vote against a 1986
Security Council statement condemning Iraq's use of mustard gas against
Iranian troops - an atrocity in which it now emerges the US was directly
implicated (as we shall see below).

Brisk trade was done in supplying Iraq. Britain joined France as a major
source of weapons for it. Iraq imported uranium from Portugal, France and
Italy, and began constructing centrifuge enrichment facilities with German
assistance. The US arranged massive loans for Iraq's burgeoning war
expenditure from American client states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
The US administration provided "crop-spraying" helicopters (to be
used for chemical attacks in 1988), let Dow Chemicals ship it chemicals for
use on humans, seconded its air force officers to work with their Iraqi
counterparts (from 1986), approved technological exports to Iraq's missile
procurement agency to extend the missiles' range (1988). In October 1987
and April 1988 US forces themselves attacked Iranian ships and oil
platforms."

" One of the battles for which the US provided battle planning
packages was the Iraqi capture of the strategic Fao peninsula in the
Persian Gulf in 1988. Since Iraq eventually relied heavily on mustard gas
in the battle, it is clear the US battle plan tacitly included the use of
such weapons. DIA officers undertook a tour of inspection of the Fao
peninsula after Iraqi forces successfully re-took it, and they reported to
their superiors on Iraq
's extensive use of chemical weapons, but their superiors were not
interested. Col. Walter P. Lang, senior DIA officer at the time, says that
"The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of
deep strategic concern". The DIA, he claimed, "would have never
accepted the use of chemical weapons against civilians, but the use against
military objectives was seen as inevitable in the Iraqi struggle for
survival." (As we shall see below, chemical weapons were used
extensively by the Iraqi army against Kurdish civilians, but DIA officers
deny they were "involved in planning any of the military operations in
which these assaults occurred".) In the words of another DIA officer,
"They (the Iraqis) had gotten better and better" and after a
while chemical weapons "were integrated into their fire plan for any
large operation". A former participant in the program told the New
York Times that senior Reagan administration officials did nothing to
interfere with the continuation of the program. The Pentagon "wasn't
so horrified by Iraq's use of gas," said one veteran of the program.
"It was just another way of killing people-whether with a bullet or
phosgene, it didn't make any difference," he said. The re-capture of
the Fao peninsula was a turning-point in the conflict, bringing Iran to the
negotiating table.

A US Senate inquiry in 1995 accidentally revealed that during the Iran-Iraq
war the US had sent Iraq samples of all the strains of germs used by the
latter to make biological weapons. The strains were sent by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention [sic] and the American Type Culture
Collection to the same sites in Iraq that UN weapons inspectors later
determined were part of Iraq's biological weapons programme (Times of
India, 2/10/02)."



"Paul Ranson"  wrote in message
news:3e70adff{at}w3.nls.net...
> "Adam Flinton"  wrote in message
> news:3e70a324$1{at}w3.nls.net...
> > The US gave him the weapons, trained him how to use em & then protected
> him
> > from any resolutions from the UN.
>
> I think that is mostly untrue. You might want to look to the French,
Germans
> and Russians for that.
>
> Paul
>

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