It is rumoured that, in his address to the United Nations today, U.S.Secretary of State Colin Powell will be revealing evidence that Iraq haslinks to a rogue organization that has no respect for human life.

This should not be a difficult task. We have known for quite some time aboutthe friendly relationship Iraq enjoyed with the CIA throughout the 1980s.

A front-page, Washington Post article late in the year 2002 made this point clearly enough. Yet, strangely, people like ColinPowell continue to look for the link that isn’t there — the one betweenIraq and al Qaeda — rather than focusing on the link that everyone wishesweren’t — the one between Iraq and Uncle Sam.

The U.S. did more to help Iraq commit war crimes than al Qaeda ever could. So why have we heard hardly a peep from the mainstream press about this since thestory “broke” last month?

The December 30 Post exposé by Michael Dobbs ran with this shocking headline: “ U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup.” It was shocking, of course, because the story was the first prominent Americanmainstream media article to make the case that the U.S. not only knewabout Iraq’s roll in the mass slaughter of Iranians and Kurds withchemical weapons in the 1980s, but that theAmerican government and military industry actually helped Saddam Hussein’sregime accomplish these war crimes.

The Post had finally clued into what anti-war activists have been sayingsince the first U.S.-led war on Iraq back in 1991. It only took a 12,000-page report on Iraqi militaryproduction and a slew of newly declassified State Department documentsfrom the 1980s to convince the crack editorial team at the helm of one ofthe leading U.S. newspapers of the patently obvious.

Alternative media journalists have already published volumes onthis “scoop.” Rabble rousers may recall such a piece that I wrote about five monthsago, “America’s BadBooks.”

If you read alternative news, you already know that U.S. President RonaldReagan’s Middle-East envoy (now Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld paida visit to Saddam Hussein back in 1984 and that Iraq was accusedthe day before that visit of gassing 600 Iranian soldiers. The newlydeclassified documents now confirm that Rumsfeld’s role was to tell Saddamthat the U.S. would view “any major reversal of Iraq’s fortunes as astrategic defeat for the West” and to normalize relations between the twocountries. Furthermore, it was not only likely that Iraq did indeed gasthose 600 Iranian soldiers, and that the U.S. was aware of it, but that the U.S. actually provided Iraq with intelligence about Iranian troopmovements to facilitate the use of chemical weapons on an “almost daily”basis.

Although the National Security Decision Directive 114 of November 26,1983, that officially enshrined U.S. policy towards Iraq is stillclassified, enough material has been declassified to establish beyond anyreasonable doubt that the U.S. had what was, in the documents, euphemistically called a“tilt” towards Iraq during its long and bloody war withIran. The fear that Iran’s Muslim fundamentalist revolution would spreadto other Middle Eastern states justified supplying Saddam Hussein’sdraconian secular dictatorship with weapons of mass destruction.

The U.S. supplied viruses such as anthrax and bubonic plague as well aschemical pesticides that could be used to make chemical weapons for useagainst human beings. The U.S. also supplied cluster bombs to Iraq througha Chilean front company.

So now we have tons of hard evidence to prove that the Reagan and Bushadministrations of the 1980s not only knew about Iraq’s use of weapons ofmass destruction, but actually supplied those weapons and the intelligencethat was needed to use those weapons effectively. Any reasonable personwould now ask whether Iraq’s willingness to use weapons of massdestruction in the 1980s is the real motivation of President Bush Jr. andDefense Secretary Rumsfeld when they call for war today. After all, wasn’tit Rumsfeld himself and Bush’s daddy that helped Saddam Hussein carry outthese heinous acts a decade and a half ago?

Strangely enough, the Washington Post article never asks thissimple question. Instead, we are presented with two explanations of U.S.participation in war crimes, one provided by the view of former U.S.ambassador to Baghdad, David Newton, and the other by former CIA militaryanalyst and author Kenneth M. Pollack. According to Newton,“Fundamentally, the policy [of helping Iraq] was justified” by thepossible spread of Iranian Muslim fundamentalism. According to Pollack,“It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now.”

If we accept Newton’s view, then the U.S. was justified in helping Iraq asthe lesser of two evils in the bloody Iran-Iraq war that killed about 100,000 Iraqis and 300,000 Iranians. And once that conflict ended the U.S. was justified in contributing to an estimated death toll of 1.2 million from the combined effects of the 1991 war on Iraq and the harsh sanctions that followed.And the U.S is now justified in calling for another war against Iraq thatwill add even more deaths to these already staggering tolls in order to destroy theU.S.-supplied weapons of mass destruction that may still be around.

If we accept Pollack’s view, then the policy of the 1980s was a “mistake.”But since the U.S. made the mistake of supplying Iraq with weapons of massdestruction in the 1980s, the U.S. was justified to fight a war againstits former ally in 1991 and to impose harsh sanctions that resulted in an estimated 1.2 million deaths. And the U.S. is now justified in calling foranother war against Iraq, causing further carnage, in order to destroy theU.S.-supplied weapons of mass destruction that may still be around. Afterall, the U.S. must correct its “mistake.”

If the U.S. is willing to justify participation in war crimes by therealpolitik of national interest (controlling the oil rich Middle Eastregion), then why should we accept the current war as anything other thanmore of the same? And why on earth would Canada join the fight? If theU.S. claims that it participated in war crimes “by mistake,” then surely caution is advised before believing that the current drive for the carpet bombing andinvasion of Iraq is anything other than another massive “mistake.”