Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas

The New York Times ^ | 8/17/02 (for editions of 8/18/02) | Patrick E. Tyler

[sinkspur]

"..speaking on condition of anonymity."

That's all you need to know.

[newsperson999]

Um isn't this story common knowledge?
News and info and Iraq here..TargetIraq.com

[RJCogburn]

That's all you need to know.

Not really.

[Hootch]

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 — 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, according to senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program........

I didn't know there were any decisive battles... Doesn't a decisive battle indicate that it had an impact on the outcome???

[Leisler]

Yea, I caught that too. The only sources with names, directly denighed it. Multiple times. Never the less the Times went with those who wouldn't be quoted. If they even exist at all.

[struwwelpeter]

Remember the 444-day Iranian hostage ordeal? Back in the 1980s if Hitler was reincarnated and promised to kill some Iranians, we would have given him some help.

Heck, Teheran still has some whupass coming, IMO.

[okie01]

My impression is that the New York Times believes we should think of Reagan, Bush, et al, as "bad people" for having favored Iraq in this particular war.

Which leads me to believe that the New York Times must have favored the ayatollahs over the hostages...

[Grut]

That's all you need to know.

How so? We still don't know who 'Deep Throat' was but we surely know that 99 and 44/100ths of the Watergate denials from named members of the Nixon administration were pure lies.

[Thud]

The NYT is shocked, SHOCKED that the sun rises in the east! All this was known at the time - see volume 2 of Cordesman's Lessons of Modern Warfare.

[RaceBannon]

http://rescueattempt.tripod.com/hostagerescueattempt

[RJCogburn]

Good example!

[sailor4321]

Ya gotta love this --- truly brilliant propaganda. "We" knew they would use it (i.e., in the future). To buy this line, you have to be prepared to believe that the people the author wants you to hate can foretell the future (or, just as marvelous a skill, can tell if plans/intentions they are told about are in fact really plans/intentions or just smoke). Either way, the author sets up a paradigm in which authority figures have special (one might say, magical) powers which can be used for evil (by right wingers military types) or for good (by whoever it is the author by implication wants the reader to support --- but you can bet they won't be conservatives). Thus, the reader-citizen is disconnected from both the exercise of state policy and from making rational judgements about its exercise by others --- it is something he/she cannot understand (having only common sense and lacking the requisite magical power) directly but must instead rely on a priestly interpreter class which, lacking common sense, better understands the new reality in which state authorities have special, magical powers. And is fluent in double-speak....

[The Great Satan]

Psst, I heard another story where we apparently gave Josef Stalin $11 billion back in the forties to fight Hitler -- even though he'd already murdered twenty million of his own people! Can you imagine?

[sinkspur]

How so?

Anybody unwilling to put his name in a news story accusing the Reagan administration of knowing about the use of poison gas is gutless, and, given the drumbeat against Iraq by the press, may not even exist at all.

[Enough is ENOUGH]

The subversive leftist editors of the New York Times who loathe the Constitution will probably issue a follow-up anti-war story in the near future that in the Afghanistan War against the Taliban the U.S. government knew the Northern Alliance was butchering the al queda/taliban fighters yet we continued backing the Northern Alliance anyway.

[Bobby777]

we would have given him some help



http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/6303315380/ref=cm_mp_etc/103-2994642-0349411

[sailor4321]

I seem to recall statements from the administration at the time that this was one of those situations where both sides deserved to lose....

[sailor4321]

Actually, the pattern has been to get the Brits to say it. Thus, during Kosovo, we were told (by Brit media) that the Serbs were slaughtering Albanians by the tens of thousands (in fact, the number 100,0000 was used just before Clinton authorized attacks on civilian targets (a war crime) in Serbia. When, as it turned out later, there might have been a couple of thousand Albanian's killed by the Serbs (with perhaps the majority of those being combatants), the US media who so uncritically used and quoted British media had "clean" hands --- so clean, in fact, that the discrepancy between what we were told was happening and what was in fact happening has never really been explained. Further, the media were essentially silent regarding the attacks on civilians (for which we roundly condemned the Nazis in WWII, the N. Koreans during the Korean War and the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam war and the Iraqi's during the Gulf War). In sum, the media have forgeited any standing to be a conscience by voicing a "middle American" perspective on events --- I think because they no longer know where "the middle" is. They believe the radical left is the middle; the middle is right wing and conservative is so extreme it should silenced by any means whatsoever.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

Reagan used his brains. So what?

Back in the 1980s if Hitler was reincarnated and promised to kill some Iranians, we would have given him some help.

Well.... if Hitler was reincarnated, we would have helped Saddam against him too, just as we helped Stalin against Hitler. That's using your brains, pitting one enemy against the other. That's what diplomacy is supposed to be about. Way to go, Reagan!