May 21, 1981 - The U.S. Senate approved a $20 billion program to return the U.S. to full-scale production of chemical and nerve-gas weapons (CW).
Though the U.S. maintained a public policy opposing chemical weapons, it extended financial and military assistance to Iraq in its war against Iran (1980-88), despite the Iraqi military’s frequent use of such weapons. Iraq had developed its “CW production capability, primarily from Western firms, including possibly a U.S. foreign subsidiary” (from a memorandum to Sec. of State Alexander Haig).
Pres. Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Mideast Donald Rumsfeld meeting Saddam Hussein in 1983. Rumsfeld had become a member of the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control the previous year.
Watch a video on the U.S./Saddam Hussein partnership
{Note: The Chilcot Inquiry final report, long delayed, is supposed to come out sometime this summer, 2012, supposedly near the end of. The U.S. has still not sought any Accountability for the abandoning the Main Mission and it's promises to the Afghan people, after 9/11 and now a decade plus of occupation, as the country walked lockstep with the first drum beat of war at Iraq, now officially over, we probably never will!}
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