by Dilip Hiro, The Observer, September 1, 2002

When it comes to demonising Saddam Hussein, nothing captures the popular imagination in America better than the statement that 'he gassed his own people'. This is an allusion to the deployment of chemical weapons by Iraq's military in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war, and then in the territory administered by the Tehran-backed Kurdish rebels after the ceasefire five months later.
As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out.

Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula.

That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago. 'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'

In 1986, it was with the aim of recapturing the Fao peninsula, taken by the Iranians in February, that Saddam's military used chemical agents so extensively that the UN Security Council stopped accepting its routine denials. Following an examination of 700 Iranian casualties, UN experts concluded that Baghdad had deployed mustard and nerve gases many times. Instead of condemning Baghdad for this, the Security Council, dominated by Washington and Moscow, both pro-Iraq, coupled its condemnation of Baghdad with its disapproval of 'the prolongation of the war' by Tehran for refusing a truce until the council had named Iraq the aggressor.

Despite its repeated reiteration of neutrality, the US had all along been pro-Baghdad. It lost no time in supplying Iraq with intelligence collected by the Saudi-owned but Pentagon-operated Airborne Warning and Control Systems (Awacs) plying in the region. Once Iraq and the US had resumed diplomatic links after the re-election of Reagan as President in November 1984, the military cooperation blossomed.

Starting in July 1986, aided by the Pentagon, which clandestinely seconded its air force officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts, Saddam's air force greatly improved its targeting accuracy, striking relentlessly the enemy's power plants, factories and bridges, and extending the range of its strikes to Iran's oil terminals in the lower Gulf. Under the rubric of escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers, the US built up an armada in the Gulf, which clashed with the small, under-equ