By: Nicholas Patler
In the United States of America we are taught from a very young age that human freedom and liberty are to be cherished above all else. Indeed, our country owes its existence to Thomas Jeffersons immortal declaration that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. So important are these rights that Jefferson called them self-evident, and he even placed them over established authority in the American Declaration of Independence when he affirmed the absolute power of the people to alter or abolish their government when it infringed on their unalienable rights. In short, the American people were to find their highest expression and God given right in self-determination self-determination which left them unfettered to pursue their individual lives and to collectively guide the affairs of their government in the direction of human liberty. Since Jefferson's time, the U.S. has both miraculously succeeded and miserably failed in living out its precepts. We have moved towards a broader notion of freedom and ethnic inclusion, and also have tragically engaged in slavery, racial, gender and ideological discrimination, and xenophobia. Today, I am at pains to say, we are once again failing miserably. For the past half-century indeed, stretching back to the post-WWI era the U.S. has feverishly pursued its interests abroad while utterly trampling on Jefferson's human declaration for other peoples and countries whose resources, markets or strategic geopolitical locations we have coveted for our own benefit. In other words, while claiming to be a country that puts emphasis on the importance of the individual and his/her aspirations, we have often moved in the opposite direction abroad, not only failing to encourage human rights but intentionally disregarding or preventing the sacred right of self-determination for other peoples, going as far as to crush budding democratic governments and movements when they have conflicted with our own narrow self-interests. We have done so even in the shadow of President Woodrow Wilson's noble but problematic attempt in the twentieth-century to proclaim Jefferson's self-determination a universal right, not just for Americans, but also for peoples throughout the world. One of the Mass Graves of Anfal Geoncide in Iraq(IKJ) Perhaps nowhere have we so neglected, indeed, trampled human rights and self-determination than we have for the Kurdish people. Beginning with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, where the international community abandoned its earlier commitment to a Kurdish state indeed, America only attended the Lausanne Conference as an unofficial participant to assure that its commercial interests were locked-in1 to U.S. and Western support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s with material and diplomatic support as he committed genocide against the Iraqi Kurds, to American backing of present-day Turkey as they deny ethnic existence to 20 million Kurds living in the southeastern part of the country, self-determination for the Kurds and just their day-to-day safetyhas been utterly abandoned by countries which have had it in their power to help, especially the U.S. In much of the world today, this striking hypocrisy between what we claim to represent and how we act is costing my country its credibility and is making a mockery out of our supposed concern for human rights. The fact that a democracy is projecting its military and economic power across the globe like some reckless empire, disregarding the rights and aspirations of other peoples, with its history of covertly thwarting self-determination, sends the message that human rights are not important to us in the larger scheme of things and that America could care less about abiding by them thereby inspiring tyrants and dictators, including former Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein and the modern day repressive government in Ankara. What is worse what is far worse in the sense that it has played an important role in the destruction of so many human lives is that the U.S. has directly supported and enabled repressive leaders and regimes with material and diplomatic support. While such support has negatively impacted many peoples, it has created someof the most tragic consequences and unimaginable horrors for the Kurdish people living in Iraq and Turkey. During the 1980s, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein with diplomacy, money and loans, and helped arm his regime with lethal weaponry, including deadly chemical and biological agents all of which, as we well know, was used to commit genocide against the Iraqi Kurdish population during the horrific Anful campaign. Moreover, Hussein was emboldened not only by U.S. material and diplomatic support, but also by the tame response from the U.S. government and the relative silence of the American media as he carried out chemical weapons attacks and mass executions against the Kurds and Iranians. A Kurdish Child in Halabja holds her sister on her back when the Saddam's regime attacked the town(IKJ) And in the past several decades, Turkey has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. military exports and training in the world. This, along with American diplomatic support and its granting of immunity, has made it easier for Ankara to commit cultural genocide against the Kurds in the southeast region of the country, and has given the Turkish military a stronger arm to physically repress the Kurds, including killing, torturing and jailing civilians, and destroying their villages and hamlets. Turkish Tanks(IKJ) With that said, this paper is written in part to highlight in an international forum U.S.-Western political and corporate support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. While this information is readily accessible to any casual researcher, much of it is still suppressed or deflected by the American government and media and many people in my country are still in the dark regarding the Kurds and their experience. It is important that we make every effort to put this on record for the world over and over to capture and motivate the popular imagination so that America and the international community will stop turning a blind eye and begin responding to the historical and contemporary plight of the Kurds. The Symbol of Anfal in Kalar-Kurdistan(IKJ) The U.S. political establishment rarely reacts to genocide and government mass murder without a concerted effort and outside pressure by an informed populace and collective organizations and movements, such as occurred during the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. In responding to these horrors, indeed in preventing them, the populace must first be informed enough to be inspired to make their reluctant governments take action. Let me make it clear that the main objective here is not just to rebuke America or the West, although they bear their share of responsibility. The goal of this paper is to diffuse information, heighten global awareness and empower us with knowledge and compassion to change things. On a personal level, as an American, it is about being honest and taking responsibility for the actions of my country of which I am a part actions that have had dire consequences for the Kurds here in Kurdistan-Iraq and in Turkey. Perhaps most importantly, I have written this paper in hopes of inspiring the international community in general, and America in particular, to begin making human rights, starting with the human rights and aspirations of the Kurdish people, a cornerstone of their foreign policies, moving beyond the old paradigm of only considering strategic and material interests. And it goes without saying that it is my hope that we will begin to hold leaders and regimes accountable for crimes of genocide and repression indeed, that we will work to prevent such from occurring when we have it in our power to do so rather than sheltering them for strategic interests or turning away because no interests are at stake, as we are doing in Darfur and the Congo. As Abraham Lincoln once said, We even we here hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In December 2002, the Bush administration hurried to New York to take possession of an 11,800-page report detailing the history of Iraq's weapons programs, which had just been completed by the U.N. Security Council. They then hastily removed 8,000 pages that detailed the enormous amount of weapons and other assistance provided by the U.S. government to Saddam Hussein, and sold by American and Western corporations to Iraq prior to 1991.1 While the Bush administration censored this important information to prevent it from becoming an obstacle in their path to war, it enabled Americans and their media if not to deny that we had aided Hussein, to at least conveniently ignore it since it had been officially erased from the historical record a collective amnesia that largely persists to this day. And while most people were not displeased to see Saddam Hussein removed from power particularly the Iraqi Kurds who were brutalized by his regime U.S. censorship of those 8,000 pages of the Iraqi weapons report six years ago continues today to prevent any serious dialogue of U.S. and Western responsibility in the deadly rise of Saddam Hussein, particularly in the media. We have conveniently removed ourselves from this inhumane equation in which we were an important variable. In short, the U.S. blacked out its own name in supporting, both directly and by its silence, the Kurdish genocide in Iraq. Essentially repeating what I said a moment ago, it is imperative that America and the West begin to openly acknowledge their role in that terrible tragedy to accept responsibility so that we can transcend such reckless power politics and begin to help create effective international policies that puts human needs and concerns first, and that can further serve as safeguards to human abuse in the future. Defeating the Ayatollah Khomeini by any means necessary: The U.S. and West sanction Iraqi terror and genocide. In 1983, Saddam Hussein began using chemical weapons against the Iranians during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in clear violation of the Geneva Protocol Against Chemical Weapons. And for the next five years, emboldened by the lack of official response or unofficial response, for that matter from the U.S. and international community, Hussein would use chemical weapons approximately 195 more times on the Iranians and then on his own civilian Kurds, including women and children. These chemical attacks against the Iraqi Kurds were part of what is known as the Anfal campaign a tragic reference to a Kurdish hell all-too-familiar in Iraq and the Middle East, but still largely unfamiliar to many people in the U.S. Indeed, if a poll were taken in America today, most people would probably respond that they have never even heard of the Anfal campaign. Some of the returned remains of recovered victims of Anfal(IKJ) This horrific operation to eliminate the rural Kurdish population not only rained down lethal chemical fire on the Kurds living in the towns of Halabja, Guptapa and other villages in northern Iraq, killing thousands of people, including many children, and causing permanent genetic mutations similar to those suffered by Japanese exposed to radiation in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the campaign also included the torture and mass shooting executions of men, women and children, the utter destruction of their villages and hamlets, and the forced imprisonment of thousands more in concentration camps where torture and extreme malnutrition were routine. By 1989, around 150,000 to 200,000 Kurds had been murdered, almost 4,000 of their villages and hamlets destroyed and over a million forcibly relocated. Moreover, thousands more lay wounded and suffering in unimaginable agony from chemical burns and poisoning. Shockingly, writes genocide scholar Samantha Power, at no point during the eighteen-month (Anfal) campaign of destruction did Reagan administration officials condemn it. The neglect and silence of the U.S. in the face of Hussein's genocide of the Kurds was made all the more appalling when newly-elected president, George H.W. Bush, President Reagan's successor, renewed relations with Hussein less than a year after Anfal, rewarding the dictator with $1 billion dollars in credit loans, thus doubling the annual amount he received from the U.S. government while he was gassing and shooting Iranian child-soldiers and Kurdish civilians. The U.S., however, had been rewarding Hussein from the very beginning with full-knowledge of his deadly and illegal use of chemical warfare. From 1983 to 1988, America had reliable information from its own intelligence, including satellite intelligence, and other sources that Hussein was using chemical weapons and literally wiping Kurdish villages off the face of the map. Recently declassified U.S. State Department memos from 1983 and 1984 reveals Iraq's almost daily use of CW (chemical weapons) against the Iranians and Kurds, even quoting the Iraqi government's admission to having annihilation insecticide that will destroy any moving creature. Indeed, the United Nations had sent fact-finding teams to Iraq in 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987, writes Power, and each time concluded that the Hussein regime had used chemical weapons. In 1988 alone, the U.N. had discovered in seven separate findings that Iraq had used chemical weapons against civilian Kurds. Amazingly, just months after the first finding in 1984, which made a brief spark in the international press, the U.S., rather than holding Iraq accountable and letting Hussein know that such further crimes would not be tolerated, actually extended diplomatic relations, essentially sanctioning his behavior. In doing so, the U.S. and international community refused to take advantage of an opportune moment to potentially prevent the horrendous nightmare of the Kurdish genocide that followed. While they initially toyed with the idea of discouraging Hussein from further using chemical weapons and did eventually offer a very weak objection mostly out of concern that violating the Geneva Protocol could be a public relations nightmare in Iraq's war against Iran, and to U.S. credibility if it was perceived that they failed to respond in some way (nothing about saving lives all about credibility and power) in the end they signaled to the dictator that he would not only escape accountability for his past actions, but that he could continue to confidently dispose of his enemies or undesirables in the most brutal fashion possible without any serious repercussions. Saddam's man in charge of the Anfal campaign, his cousin Ali Hasan al Majid, expressed this brazen attitude to kill and torture with immunity and without restraint when he declared in a taped meeting with supporters, I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F*** them! Chemical Ali(IKJ) Al Majid had reason to be brash and arrogant. He understood that the world's strongest superpower was obsessed with the military defeat of Iran and that it supported Iraq. Former Bush Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfield, had been sent to Iraq a few years earlier to renew relations with Hussein. With Iran and the United Nations accusing Iraq of using chemical weapons, Rumsfield made it clear that the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old-war with Iran would be contrary to U.S. interests. For America and much of the West, the lives of the innocent children, women and men were of little concern, and the inhumane methods of death and destruction used against them, reminiscent of the Nazi genocide, such as chemical gassings, mass shooting executions and concentration camps, could be ignored or silenced as long as Saddam Hussein defeated America's then public enemy number one, the Ayatollah Khomeini. the Ayatollah Khomeini(IKJ) Tragically, until that end was achieved, essentially any amount of suffering and death was acceptable. As one unidentified Western diplomat openly admitted in an interview with David McDowell, author of A Modern History of the Kurds, in 1987: his government had no intention of jeopardizing its political and economic prospects in Iraq and the Gulf for the sake of the Kurds. Moral and legal obligations, supposedly the cornerstone of the American and many Western systems of government, were simply brushed aside in the name of oil, since the West feared this prized Iraqi resource falling into the hands of the Ayatollah; in the name of strategic power, where the U.S. vehemently opposed a strong Iran in the Middle East; and, we must not forget, moral and legal obligations were discarded by the U.S. in its obsession to take revenge against Iran for its takeover of the American embassy in Tehran a few years earlier, including the taking of American hostages, and the Iranians unforgivable sin of pursing self-determination by overthrowing America's puppet-leader, the Shah. The Shah(IKJ) Simply put, the attitude of the U.S. seemed to be that it wanted Iran defeated by any means necessary and at any expense. In a top-secret message, President Reagan even encouraged Saddam Hussein to step up his air war and bombing of Iran. Moreover, a senior intelligence defense officer told the New York Times that the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern. If the Kurds were the unfortunate casualties crushed in the process, so be it. Saddam Hussein would be given immunity and left alone (with our help) to do what we wanted him to do, even if terror was his means to our end. Iranian Troops(IKJ) Arming a genocidal regime U.S. and Western assistance to Iraq, of course, extended beyond diplomatic immunity to commit genocide against the Kurds and chemical attacks against the Iranians. We not only more or less gave our consent, but we helped provide the resources and weaponry that enabled Hussein to carry out his campaign of terror against the Kurds. Without high-tech weapons from the West, says one correspondent, Iraq's war against Iran and Kuwait would never have taken place. Today, it is still difficult to obtain a full detailed listing of all the money, weapons, chemicals and other assistance the U.S. and other Western countries provided and sold to Hussein. The U.S., as mentioned, went to extreme lengths to censor and delete specific parts of Iraq's Weapons Declaration that revealed American and Western political and corporate complicity in arming Hussein. But we at least have some of the details from leaks in the press, penetrating investigative research and fairly recent declassified U.S. documents. Moreover, we can clearly demonstrate the important point that needs to be stressed over and over, which is that much of this assistance was done with full-knowledge of Hussein's crimes both during and after the Anfal campaign as well as in the Iran-Iraq war. Thus, something disturbingly new in history had taken place: a democracy a supposed defender of human rights intentionally aligned itself with a genocidal regime. In the U.S. alone, twenty-four companies, along with fifty subsidiaries of foreign companies that sold Iraq arms within U.S. borders, supplied Iraq with billions of dollars worth of high-tech weapons and infrastructure support to build more. These included such corporate giants as Dupont, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Bechtel Group, Silicon Valley, Unisys, Rockwell, Sperry and Eastman Kodak. American companies also sold Hussein chemicals to make deadly mustard gas and sarin, and they provided him with seed stock or starter germs to create deadly diseases whose names today strike terror in the hearts of many living in western cities, such as anthrax, botulism, West Nile Virus and E. coli. Between 1986 and 1989, foreign policy expert Chalmers Johnson writes that, some seventy-three transactions took place that included bacterial cultures and this after the U.S. mildly objected to Iraq's use of chemical warfare. Even six months after the Kurdish Hiroshima in Halabja the largest and most publicized chemical weapons attack journalist Paul Rockwell revealed that, a Maryland company sent 11 strains of germs four types of anthrax to Iraq, including a microbe strain called 11966, developed for germ warfare at Fort Detrick (USA) in the 1950s. (IKJ) Beyond selling lethal chemical and biological agents to Hussein, U.S. companies negligently provided his genocidal regime with plans and technical drawings on how to build chemical production facilities and factories. This would be something equivalent to providing Adolf Hitler with instructions for building concentration camps and gas chambers in Nazi Europe and selling him the Zyclon-B to boot. Of course, U.S. weapons and chemical companies could not have done business with Hussein without official oversight and direct permission from the American government. A 1994 report by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee revealed that the U.S. government licensed dozens of companies to sell weapons and weapons parts and technology to Iraq, and repeatedly approved the sale of materials to make mustard gas, VX nerve agent, anthrax and other biological and chemical weapons. The Senate report also stated that, the same micro-organisms exported by the U.S. were identical to those U.N. inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi biological warfare program. This report came from the legislative branch of the U.S. government of all places, and has been public information for years, yet still relatively few Americans are aware of it. A mass Killing of Kurds by Iraqi Regime in 1988(IKJ) The U.S. also directly provided Iraq with billions of dollars in farm credits, which were really fraudulent loans that enabled Hussein to build up his conventional and chemical weapons arsenal, and they pressured other public and private entities to give Iraq loans to purchase weapons exports. Under President Reagan's leadership, the CIA made sure that Iraq had sufficient weapons, including gun, tank and air bomber ammunition. They also made an intense effort to get Hussein cluster bombs, which kill and maim numerous human beings at one time as they spread deadly bomblets over large areas. But that's precisely why CIA director, William Casey, wanted them so as to destroy human waves of Iranians, as he so callously put it. Today, modern battlefields are littered with cluster bombs, which continue to kill long after wars have ended. Indeed, ninety-eight percent of those killed by cluster bombs are civilians, says one expert on the issue. I wonder how many of these terribly inhumane cluster bombs were used against the Kurds how many people were killed how many Kurdish and Iranian children were left maimed for life and continue to be hurt and killed to this day? The Pentagon and CIA further gave Iraq a steady stream of intelligence and strategic military advice, including techniques to increase kill efficiency in combat. And a recently declassified document also reveals that, the CIA provided Iraq, through third parties that included Israel and Egypt, with military hardware,including helicopters used in the shooting and chemical bombings of Kurds and their villages. With all considered, the United States government may have very well provided the actual guns and bullets used in the mass shooting executions of the Kurds, and the tanks and bombs that destroyed their villages! Of course, the U.S. was not alone although as the most powerful democracy in the world, its complicity in supporting tyranny and genocide was the most egregious. Several European countries and companies, along with Russia, Japan, China and Brazil, also sold Iraq an untold dollar amount in lethal military hardware and arms, and materials to make chemical weapons. Britain, Germany and France exported to Iraq ignition systems for missiles capable of carrying biological and nuclear warheads, and tanks, bombers and helicopter gun ships. And like the U.S., Britain actually doubled its export credit to Iraq after the Anfal campaign and the publicized chemical attack on Halabja. Kurdish Civilians who were killed by Iraqi regime in Halabja(IKJ) It also appears that perhaps a dozen German pharmaceutical companies, with the assistance of the government, provided Iraq with material and the know-how to manufacture chemical weapons, lethal assistance which was also sold to Hussein by France, Italy and the Netherlands. Shockingly, once the Anfal campaign was underway, a major German company even gave cover for the importation of materials for chemical weapons production in Baghdad. This was all the more a mockery for the Kurds who were victims of chemical attacks since it was Germany that first developed and used chemical gas warfare on other human beings in WWI, and now, over seventy years later, was going to extraordinary lengths to keep the wheels of chemical warfare turning at the expense of the Kurdish people in Iraq. Hahabja after the desturaction(IKJ) Finally, it's important to stress over and over in an international forum the fact that leaders and officials in all of the countries that helped arm Saddam Hussein, especially the U.S., were aware that he was using their assistance to murder and torture civilians. And the executives at the corporations manufacturing and supplying chemicals and conventional weapons and support, sheltered by the safety and luxury of their environments and lifestyles, knew as well that the Iraqi dictator was committing terror against his vulnerable Kurdish minority. Yet they still made the choice to act immorally and recklessly by assisting his mass murder and genocide with knowledge of his crimes. They can claim that their sales and assistance was legal, which it may have very well been by some precarious technical loophole, but they cannot claim and we should not let them claim that their actions were ethical and moral. Instead, we should remind them that they bear responsibility for the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime, and that such complicity in human suffering for the sake of power and money will no longer be tolerated. This unsettling point is important to stress since, tragically, the U.S. and other governments still to this day provide repressive and lethal regimes with the means to kill. Indeed, the U.S. is by far the largest exporter of weapons and military assistance in the world, much of which goes to countries with poor human rights records. And once again such reckless behavior is negatively impacting the Kurds this time in Turkey. Indeed, Turkey is one of the largest recipients of U.S. military hardware and training, receiving billions of dollars worth annually, and the government uses this weaponry and military know-how to commit terror and repression against the Kurds, a campaign of denying them self-determination and ethnic rights that has been ongoing for the last eighty years. Rather than encouraging freedom and democratic rights for the Kurds, who desperately need them, and holding Ankara accountable, America is directly supporting tyranny in Turkey, both materially and diplomatically, as it did in Iraq during the 1980s. Turkish Forces in Kurdistan(IKJ) This has to stop. As I stressed at the beginning of this paper, it is time that the U.S. and international community begin making human rights, starting with the human rights and aspirations of the Kurdish people, a cornerstone of their foreign policies, moving beyond the old paradigm of only considering strategic and material interests. The U.S., however, has demonstrated time and again that it is not willing to abide by the International Court, or any other ethical standards of behavior when it is not in its interest. Thus, we must imaginatively, creatively and compassionately find ways to recreate politics and international affairs, and change the rules of behavior so that we can minimize the conflicts between human rights and narrow national interests. Indeed, the latter must become subordinated to the former, not the other way around as it is today. We you and I must do this together, because if we continue to leave it to the status quo and power elites, we will continue, by our silence, apathy and fear, to curse the world with more Halabjas, more Guptapas, and more Saddam Husseins. We owe it to the children and future generations to give them something better. The writer's Notes: (IKJ) Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003) 369: U.S. commercial interests were secured with the Turco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Hold and Co., 2004) 224. Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003) 178. Power, 172, 186, 188-190, 193, 195-98, 232, 242, 244; David McDowell, A Modern History of the Kurds (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1997) 357-360. Power, 234-236. Power, 550, footnote 16; McDowell, 361; The National Security Archive, George Washington University, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984, Documents 24, 25 and 41 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/). The National Security Archive, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984, Documents 24, 25 and 47. Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds (Human Rights Watch, 1993) 349. Jeremy Scahill, What about Those Chemical Weapons? The Saddam in Rummy's Closet, Counter Punch, August 2, 2002; The National Security Archive, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984. Documents 28, 31, 32, 36 and 37. McDowell, 367 footnote 57. The National Security Archive, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984, Documents 26 and 53. The National Security Archive, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984, Document 61. Elson E. Boles, Helping Iraq Kill with Chemical Weapons: The Relevance of Yesterday's U.S. Hypocrisy Today, Counter Punch, October 10, 2002. Shockingly, it appears that some U.S. intelligence officers and leaders believed that Saddam's chemical warfare might shorten the Iran-Iraq war, disturbingly evocative of the argument made by German chemist, Fritz Haber, the pioneer of chemical warfare during WWI, when he claimed that chemical weapons were a way of saving countless lives, if it meant that war could be brought to an end sooner, Diana Preston, Before the Fallout: Form Marie Curie to Hiroshima (New York: Berkley Books, 2005) 53. Paul Rockwell, Who Armed Iraq? San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 2003. Amy and David Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers (New York: Hyperion Books, 2004) 62; Rockwell, Who Armed Iraq? San Francisco Chronicle, and Iraq's U.S. Arsenal: Complicity of firms in Saddam's crimes against humanity now well-documented, Metro, Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper, February 20-26, 2003; Johnson, 224. 1994 Report by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, quoted in Mohamad Bazzi, United Nations Correspondent, Source: List Includes U.S. Firms That Aided Iraqis, Long Island, NY Newsday, December 13, 2002. Bazzi, Newsday, December 31, 2002. The National Security Archive, Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984, Document 61; Frida Berrigan, Weapons of war killer of innocents: Like landmines, U.S. wants its cluster bombs, San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 2007; Johnson, 224; Power, 173. Rockwell, Who Armed Iraq? San Francisco Chronicle; McDowell, 363, 367 McDowell, 363, 367 footnote 62; Preston, 52-53. Nicholas Patler, What We Owe Children: Solving the world's problems may require that we humble ourselves to the fact that the U.S. contributes to many of them, Eightyone, August 2006: 32-33; Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000) 14-15, 86-87; 655 report, FY 02 International Military Education & Training (www. fas.org/asmp/profiles/655-2002/6552002.html).
Source: Kurdocide
