Biological Backlash

With Reagan no longer incapacitated but on the other side, maybe it’s now pertinent to mention that he had partnered up with Saddam a few decades ago to engage in war against Iran.  With support of the United States, Iraq pushed the line back into Iranian territory and held it for a while. Iran mounted a successful counter attack, which pushed the line back to the Iraqi border and threatened invasion. An ultimatum was given by Iran for Saddam Hussein to step down as the leader of Iraq or else his people would face annihilation. It was at this time that Reagan authorized Saddam to use chemical and biological weapons against their common enemy, and the results were devastating to the Iranian army. The attacks were so effective in fact that from this experience, Saddam realized he had found a friend he could count on. Americans probably figured the friend he’d found was Reagan, not so.

Saddam’s ethnic background as a Sunni made him part of the minority in Iraq. The Kurds to the north and the Shiite Muslims to the south had always outnumbered the Sunni. This basic fact is what lead Saddam to begin work on the ‘mass graves’ we Americans are so eager to cry out about as justification for war. The same weapons he used to destroy the Iranian armies, he in turn unleashed on his fellow Iraqis in the north and south. Whether or not our intelligence had indicated that Saddam was a leader capable of using these weapons ‘responsibly’, a feeling of guilt over what had transpired must have landed somewhere near Reagan’s desk during this time.

This historical truth may in fact be why Bush Sr. decided against unseating Saddam as the leader of Iraq. Perhaps there still existed a fear that he would use those weapons again if forced to do so. Curiously, soldiers returning from duty following that conflict have for years now reported random nose-bleeds and chronic coughing as two of the milder variety of symptoms of what has been called ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ in the years since. Of course, the pentagon continues to refuse that such a condition exists, but from a man who’s seen it first hand, take it from me that something happened to those guys in the desert way back when. So instead of an assault on Saddam waged by US troops, the Shiite Muslims to the south were incited by us to attempt an overthrow of the dictator on their own. They were mercilessly slaughtered and our troops headed home.

Fast-forward to the situation today and it’s easy to assume why Saddam may have had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons seeing as we probably still had some of the receipts. The fact was though, that his fun with these particular toys had ended and been literally buried for a period of time. UN weapons inspectors had their buttons pushed by him for a long while, but had never actually come up with anything substantial that indicated he was up to his old tricks. Our own government even denied the existence of ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ repeatedly, so in terms of evidence supporting our claim for war being a necessity, all we really had to go on was the genocide he partook in directly after we authorized him to melt Iranian flesh with them. This political Pandora’s Box was never opened for obvious reasons, but it didn’t keep the Bush administration from pursuing war based on the existence of such weapons.

In typical American fashion the ironies all of this brings to mind does not enter into the repertoires of our talking heads in their analysis of what’s taking place today. Politically driven goals are at stake, so I suppose there’s no time to stop and look in the mirror, but deep inside at least some of us there has to be unsure feelings based on what’s taken place in these past few years. How much of the past matters in terms of what’s taking place now is arbitrary depending on who you ask, but our ignorance of it points to something significant. What that is remains to be seen, but these facts that remain buried in the mainstream drive-thru news outlet vaults are well known to those on the other side of the pond. Whether or not we choose to look in the mirror doesn’t matter to history as it’s unfolding right now. If we are to overcome all obstacles, then maybe Reagan’s alliance with Saddam and the results it caused will fall be omitted from our children’s history textbooks along with Christopher Columbus’s treatment of that native people of North America. On the other hand, should failure occur, everything we’ve done in the past thirty years will have to be reevaluated with a heavy dose of realism.

The omissions from our own history have been coupled with the digging up of similar omitted aspects of our enemy’s history to create a political platform for this action. The odds of success or failure is really insignificant as the outcome will be politically perceived based on partisan alliance in the long run. The scorecard here in America will be marked up predictably by both sides, but are they the ones that truly matter anymore? Has our act grown old to the point where omissions such as Reagan’s chemical alliance with Saddam start to become part of our reality out of necessity? Supremacy has shielded us from having to consider such things in our everyday lives, but very few things truly last forever in this life.