[sinkspur]

"..speaking on condition of anonymity."

That's all you need to know.

[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???

[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...

[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.

[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?

[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.

[rightwing2]

Isn't it interesting that we find out that Reagan and Bush Sr. provided arms to Saddam Hussein, who Bush Sr. later purposefully mischaracterized as another Adolf Hitler, along with about $2 billion in modern arms to terrorist Iran and hundreds of millions more in modern arms to Communist China in his badly misnamed "Peace Pearl" program? Oh yeah and I forgot Reagan's support for Bin Laden and a bunch of other extremist anti-American Islamicist terrrorists in Afghanistan. Now, a less conservative President has come along named George Dubya who wants to launch the US into an unprovoked war with Iraq to further bolster his poll numbers. It will be nice when we finally elect a President who has the strategic and moral vision to know who to support and who to oppose as well as when war is justified and when it is not. George Dubya has proven with his latest plan to invade Iraq that he is not that man.

[LanaTurnerOverdrive]

"I did agree that Iraq should not lose the war, but I certainly had no foreknowledge of their use of chemical weapons."

Maybe. But AFTER they DID use chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988, we continued to do business with them and supply them with aid, right up until they invaded Kuwait. This foreign policy, in my opinion, nullifies the claim that "We must go invade Iraq....after all THEY GASSED THEIR OWN PEOPLE!!"