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"Note that Saddam's last use of WMD, against the Kurds, employed Sarin gas...."

A cyanide-based gas and mustard gas were used at Halabja, not Sarin. In addition, the fatalities it seems were NOT down to Saddam but the Iranians. So says Dr Stephen Pelletiere the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war and a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000:

"You can't kill that many people using gas, in a concentrated period, in terrain such as exists in northern Iraq.

"In fact, it would be very difficult to kill even 5,000 in this way.

"The great majority of the victims seen by reporters and other observers who attended the scene were blue in their extremities.

"That means that they were killed by a blood agent, probably either cyanogen chloride or hydrogen cyanide. Iraq never used and lacked any capacity to produce these chemicals.

"But the Iranians did deploy them. Therefore the Iranians killed the Kurds.

"The Iraqis did fire mustard gas into Halabja, after the Iranians had attacked and occupied the town, but despite its fearsome reputation mustard gas is an incapacitating agent, rather than an efficient killer.

"Slightly more than two per cent of those exposed to mustard gas attack can be expected to die.

"Iran had always supported its 'human wave" attacks by using a non-persistent form of mustard gas which would allow shock troops to occupy Iraqi positions once Saddam's troops had retreated.

"The Iraqis had learned to develop a heavier, more persistent form of the gas which was designed to slow down the enemy advance.

"Unfortunately for the spin-doctors, much of the mustard gas that was used at Halabja, which is a border town in a much-disputed territory, carried the Iranian signature."

http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/siteinfo/newsround/iraq2.html http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/bios/prev/spelletiere.html http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/11-18-98.html http://www.rense.com/general30/blair.htm