Posted on 04/10/2003 4:27:37 PM PDT by backhoe
Name one weapon in the Iraqi arsenal that was made in the United States.
I have offered that challenge to dozens of so-called anti-war activists who claim that the U.S. armed Iraq. According to these protesters for "peace," George Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan supplied Iraq with tons of weapons.
None have been able to name the specific weapon – missile, bomb, fighter, tank or shell – that is U.S.-made or has U.S. equipment installed in it. None have been able to name any specific weapon system.
All of them have failed the challenge, providing no more than allegations that U.S. parts are in Iraqi missiles or U.S. electronics are being used by the Iraqi military. One protester even claimed that Iraq was armed with U.S.-made trucks.
Since when is a truck a weapon? Are the Iraqis going to drive backwards, fuel tank first, into the U.S. Army?
Time to separate the myth from the reality. The propaganda spun by the far left is false. The facts show that Iraq is armed with a wide range of weapons – none of which came from the U.S.
Iraqi Air Force
The Iraqi air force does not fly Falcons or Eagles. The majority of the Iraqi air force is made in Russia. The Russian MiG and Sukhoi design bureaus supplied Iraq with hundreds of advanced strike-fighters and the Mach 3 Foxbat interceptor.
Saddam could field a force of advanced MiG-29 Fulcrum fighters if they had not chickened out of combat during the Gulf War, flying to Iran for asylum. The Iranians, who love Saddam even less than we do, never returned the MiGs.
The remainder of the Iraqi air force comes from France and China. The Chinese supplied Saddam with the Chengdu F-7, a copy of the Russian MiG-21. The F-7 can fly from unimproved runways and is known to be a vicious in-close dog fighter.
However, the French Mirage F-1 is reportedly the best jet fighter in Iraqi hands. You can view an Iraqi F-1 in action on the State Department Web site, testing a chemical spraying system.
If you still believe that the Iraqis have no chemical weapons, think again. Iraq did not modify its best multimillion-dollar fighter jet to spray for fruit flies.
Anyone with half of a brain knows that you cannot keep a modern jet fighter in the air without spare parts. Thus the Russian, Chinese and French jets should be museum pieces after 12 years of a so-called U.N. ban on weapons sales to Iraq. Yet somehow Saddam has his air force flying over 1,000 sorties a month.
Thanks to excellent reporting by Bill Gertz we now know that France has been supplying spare parts for Saddam's Mirage fighters. The French spare parts arrived in Baghdad not 20 years ago during the Cold War but last year, just in time to face our forces today.
Merci! With friends like, that who needs enemies?
Iraqi Missiles
Perhaps the Iraqi missile force has some U.S.-made weapons? Not. The primary Iraqi missile is the Russian-made Scud. Other missiles include the FROG-7 from Russia, the Exocet from France and the Silkworm from China.
The Iraqi air defense has plenty of missiles ... from Russia, China and France. The SA-2 Guideline, SA-3 Goa and SA-6 Gainful SAM missiles are all of Russian or Chinese manufacture. The French also supplied Baghdad with a number of Roland air defense missile systems.
Even the missile parts are from Chinese, German and French sources. Israeli authorities know full well what is inside Iraqi-made Scud missiles since many of them fell on Tel Aviv during the Gulf War. The Israelis found that the Scud warhead electronics were made in Germany – not the U.S.A.
In addition, William Safire recently wrote a column noting that a Chinese chemical company had supplied rocket fuel to Iraq through a French front company. Safire identified the fuel, the companies and the Iraqi missile facility where it was mixed into new Iraqi rockets. Again, the missile fuel sale was made within the last year, just in time to make new Iraqi missiles pointed at Kuwait, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Saddam sends his love to Paris and Beijing. Without your help he certainly could not threaten his neighbors with nerve gas and anthrax.
Iraqi Army
Okay, if not jet fighters and missiles, then how about tanks? Certainly the biggest weapons seller in the world, the U.S.A., sold tanks to Iraq.
The Iraqi armor force is made up of Chinese and Russian models familiar to any "cold" warrior. The Iraqi T-72 and T-55 tanks are all of Russian manufacture. The Iraqis also have a large number of Type-59 Chinese tanks and Russian-made BMP armored troop carriers. No M-1 Abrams here.
How about attack helicopters? The Iraqis have a number of choppers they used against the Kurds and Shiites.
So sorry, the Iraqi attack chopper force is Russian and French. The Russians supplied Iraq with a large number of the Mil-24 Hind attack helicopters, armed to the teeth with cannon, missiles and even chemical weapon sprayers.
The French supplied Saddam with a large number of Gazelle attack helicopters. The same French also managed to keep Saddam's attack helicopter force flying today with spare parts.
Guns, then? Surely the U.S. supplied Saddam with guns?
Nope. The main Iraqi artillery is the French 155mm howitzer. The remainder of Iraq's artillery is 122mm Russian-made cannons and Russian-made short-range rocket launchers. Even the Iraqi foot soldier is armed with the venerable AK-47 of Russian and Chinese make.
Iran-Iraq War
The facts are that during the Iran-Iraq war the U.S. supplied Iraq with something much more valuable than guns: satellite information on when and where the Iranians were going to attack.
Of course, current anti-war activists seize this piece of information without putting it into historical context. The information was supplied during the height of the Cold War. The main threat to America was the Soviet Union and the biggest fear in the Gulf was the Ayatollah Khomeini.
You remember the chant "death to America"? It almost seems that the ayatollah invented it. Ironically, the Ayatollah made his way to Tehran from his home in exile – Paris.
The Reagan administration, aware that the Iranian ayatollah had threatened to turn the Gulf into a sea of fire, assisted Saddam so that he would not lose the war. The assistance stopped short of helping Saddam win the war.
In fact, when it appeared the Iraqis were on the verge of victory, the Reagan administration transferred real weapons to the Iranians. The infamous Iran-Contra scandal involved a large number of badly needed U.S. TOW anti-tank missiles that were sold to Iran.
The U.S. missiles proved to be critical to the Iranian defense against Iraq's superior Russian tank force. The result was a stalemate and the war ended.
France/Russia/China
The fact is that Saddam owes billions to France, Russia and China for weapons purchases. Clearly, Iraq is buying more weapons from Paris and Beijing despite a U.N. arms embargo. Perhaps one reason why Paris, Moscow and Beijing oppose a war in Iraq is because they would lose their best customer.
The propaganda spun by the far left that the U.S. armed Iraq is false and backed by no facts. The so-called anti-war types are more interested in slamming Bush than stopping a war. None have been able to name one American-made weapon in the Iraqi arsenal.
More importantly, none of them can give one good reason why Saddam should stay in power.
The term for this is "Postaganda"
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The one case they often use is Cardoen, who was an arms smuggler (working out of Chile), who claimed that he was secretly working for the CIA. He tried to export various weapons components (zirconium for cluster munitions, switches from ISC, and modified helicopters from a field in the Dallas area) from the US. He was caught and tried (and convicted). While using the "CIA" defense in court, he relied on an affidavit from Howard Teicher. This was a mistake for Cardoen, since even though Teicher's claims were based on classified NSDDs, the government prosecutors still had partial access to them and could prove the claims false (which, now that they are declassified, anyone can). Cardoen was convicted; the claims of US backing were shown to be false in a court of law (with a Clinton administration prosecutor, I might add).
Of course, that doesn't stop the left from insisting that Cardoen was a CIA operative. But now that the NSDDs have been declassified (they dealt with nuclear weapon stockpiles, and had nothing to do with Iraq), it can easily be shown that it was all based on a lie (not that the proof has stopped the left from still using the same lie).
When NSDD-26 was declassified, Teicher changed his story a bit, and instead of it being that document during the Reagan administration, it was instead NSD-26 from the Bush era. The only problem with that story is that Teicher had already left the NSC by the time that that document (which he earlier claimed to have authored) was produced. In further discount of his claims, NSD-26 is now also available to the public. Contrary to the left's lies that it showed "secret" support for Iraq's chemical weapon program, it instead insisted that Iraq be told that "any illegal use of chemical and/or biological weapons will lead to economic and politic sanctions". The only content relating to support for Iraq was "economic and poltical incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior", a policy that, while stupid (it involved a lot of guaranteed agricultural loans that Iraq mis-used to buy weapons from other parties), had nothing related to the bogus claims of the left that we somehow armed Iraq.
Either the authors of these documents didn't fully investigate the facts, or they are being deliberately misleading to suggest the US is more to blame than it really is.
I've never seen any articles (it seemed a subject the media accepted without question, and never revisited), but you can check the source material yourself. Both NSD-26 (Reagan era) and NSDD-26 (Bush document) are available on-line through the presidential libraries, as are various articles describing Teicher's comments and claims before their release. Just reading the documents themselves shows that Teicher's claims are lies.
And how do you know so much on the topic?
I worked on a project in the early 1990s to catalog everything (that we could determine, at least) in Iraqi inventory. So when the "US armed Iraq" stories started showing up, they immediately triggered my suspicions, since I knew what Iraq had according to the best pre-war intelligence (and none of it was US manufactured, except some helicopters such as the Bell 212/214, which were not only unarmed but had been supposedly purchased for civilian use). The Cardoen case is another matter; I happened to know the details from two different perspectives. One was because of some helicopters (civilian, modified for carrying munitions by Cardoen for illegal export) found in the Dallas area; the other was because of cluster bomb technology obtained by Cardoen from ISC. Initially, there was some suspicion that there might have been US government involvement in the arms transfers (taking Cardoen's claims of CIA support initially at face value), but the details of the case pretty much proved that no such involvement was there, beyond more than a shadow of a doubt (among other reasons, Cardoen ran into various custom problems throughout the 1980s that any CIA assistance would have been able to easily overcome). Once his case fell back onto using Teicher as his only affirmation for that claim, it was clear that he was lying (due to the availability of the NSDs/NSDDs whose contents were either unrelated, as in the case of Reagan's, or the opposite of his claims, as in the Bush NSDDs).
Unfortunately, by that time the "US armed Iraq" lie had been told and re-told so many times that it was in the collective memory of the public, while the media curiously didn't seem to want to cover the Cardoen case with any level of publicity once it was clear that his guilt meant the innocence of Reagan and Bush-1 (regarding this particular topic, at least). Thus, there are no stories (that I know of; perhaps there were a few honest journalists who covered the story but I never saw their work) vindicating the U.S. But fortunately, the availability of the presidential archives and court records means that the truth is available for anyone who really wants to know it. Hopefully it will make a great book for some aspiring historian one day.
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