That was the case until CNN broadcast worldwide pictures of Kurdish refugees fleeing Saddam's vengeance in the north. Bush, on a golfing vacation, was obliged to react. He declared a no-fly zone in the north and ordered Saddam to cease his attacks. Saddam very quickly backed down. In the south, however, there was no such TV coverage and no U.S. reaction. The slaughter of the Shiites continued. A complete no-fly zone was established there only many months later.

The United States was not just a neutral bystander to the Shiite uprising. In Iraq this year, several survivors of the Shiite revolt told my colleague Despratx that U.S. troops blocked their attempts to march on Baghdad. Others asserted that American forces destroyed huge stocks of captured Iraqi arms rather than turn them over to the rebels. Former Special Forces officer Gonzalez confirmed that his unit repeatedly blew up caches of captured weapons that the insurgents were trying to obtain.

But 1991 was not the first time U.S. leaders closed their eyes to Saddam's use of chemical weapons. When word first broke in 1983 that Iraq was using mustard gas against Iranian troops, the Reagan administration (after an oral tap on the wrist delivered by then Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld) studiously ignored the issue. Saddam, after all, was then the West's de facto partner in a war against the feared fundamentalist regime of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. Saddam's chemical weapons were provided largely by companies in Germany and France. The United States provided him with --among many other things -- vital satellite intelligence on enemy troop positions.

U.S. support for Saddam increased in 1988 when Rick Francona, then an Air Force captain, was dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency. His mission: to provide precise targeting plans to the Iraqis to cripple a feared a new Iranian offensive. Shortly after arriving, Francona discovered that the Iraqis were now using even more deadly chemical weapons -- nerve gas -- against the Iranians. He informed his superiors in Washington.

The response, he said, was immediate. "We were told to cease all of our cooperation with the Iraqis until people in Washington were able to sort this out. There were a series of almost daily meetings on 'How are we going to handle this, what are we going to do?' Do we continue our relations with the Iraqis and make sure the Iranians do not win this war, or do we let the Iraqis fight this on their own without any U.S. assistance, and they'll probably lose? So there are your options -- neither one palatable." Francona concluded, "The decision was made that we would restart our relationship with the Iraqis ... We went back to Baghdad, and continued on as before. "

This policy continued even after it was discovered that Saddam was using chemical weapons against his own people, the Kurds of Halabja. Fourteen years later, in March 2003, attempting to justify the coming invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush repeatedly cited the Halabja atrocity. "Whole families died while trying to flee clouds of nerve and mustard agents descending from the sky," he said. "The chemical attack on Halabja provided a glimpse of the crimes Saddam Hussein is willing to commit." But President Bush never explained the assistance that the United States had given Saddam at the time.

When news first broke about the atrocity in 1988, the Reagan administration did its utmost to prevent condemnation of Saddam, fighting Congress' attempt to impose restrictions on trade with Iraq. President Bush's father was then vice president. Another key administration figure involved in the fight was Reagan's national security advisor, Gen. Colin Powell.

Now, to return to the original question: Did the first Bush administration cynically choose to ignore Saddam's use of chemical weapons in March 1991, just as the Reagan administration did in the late 1980s? And has the current Bush administration brushed this history of complicity with real WMD under the rug, while using nonexistent WMD as a reason for war? The indisputable answer is yes.

Recent Stories