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Thanks for the explanation. Would it be fair to say that the items on that list would be commonplace in a university setting or other benign research agency in most countries during the 1980's?

A university with a strong agricultural program would be a good place to look. Many of the bacteria samples sold to Iraq were cultivated at the University of Iowa at Ames, Iowa -- particularly the anthrax.

It looks as though we are on parallel courses to find out the degree and type of U.S. assistance to Iraq. I would like to know how much was policy and how much was the Iraqis taking advantage of lax controls. Because of my abysmal ignorance of things biological, the above list causes me to raise an eyebrow. In trying to pin down a pattern from the individual items by going through them one by one, I can detect a benign or simply lackadaisical control regeme that becomes relevant only in the presence of a maniacal personality such as Saddam Hussein.

The controls (export licensing) failed to do what they were intended to do but, to be fair, the policy was sound and well directed. Saddam's ruthlessness was then (the 1980s) a developing characteristic, not fully manifested. What we can now read as warning signs seem to have been lost in the contingencies of the moment. There are always dire prognostications but at what point do they rise to the level that requires more than proper posturing? I don't think I would have been ready, in the 1980s, to commit an expeditionary force to the Mideast to prevent the possible rise of a possible threat. We would have been stumbling blindly into a hornet's nest.

I am not willing to cede the moral high ground to the babbling deviants who seize on the existance of commonplace shipments as proof positive of our complicity with a madman. In hindsight the destinations of some of the agents causes pause, but that is hindsight. We are not responsible for Saddam Hussein and only in the most tertiary sense did we contribute to the carnage that characterizes the Mideast.