[Texan]

Wall Street Journal
February 14, 2003

From 1974, under then-Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, France sold Iraq arms and nuclear technology; in the 1970s and 1980s, France became Iraq's third-largest supplier of weapons after the Soviet Union and China, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Mr. Chirac also agreed with Mr. Hussein to deliver a 40-megawatt nuclear research reactor and 12.5 kilograms of uranium-235. Israel destroyed the reactor in a bombing raid in 1981, fearing Iraq would use it to develop nuclear weapons.

Germany's arms sales to Iraq were smaller and consisted mainly of helicopters. But Germany was one of Iraq's sources of technology and materials for chemical and biological weapons programs, says Jean Pascal Zanders, head of chemical and biological warfare research at the Stockholm institute.

But the U.S. was also supplying arms to Iraq during the 1980s, delivering 117 Bell, Hughes and other helicopters to the Iraqi Air Force. These are thought to have been used in the Iraq-Iran war, during which the U.S. also gave Iraq real-time satellite intelligence of the battlefield. U.S. companies supplied Iraq with pathogens and specialist equipment that was used to develop chemical and biological weapons, according to the Stockholm institute.

"Each of the major European countries and America are to blame for the arming of Saddam [Hussein]," says Mr. Dodge of Warwick University. "There are no angels in this story."

I have listened to you people on the board blame the United States for arming Iraq, that I was a little surprised by this information.