Who armed Iraq?

[ABsolution]

George Bush, senior, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy. Is this accurate? http://www.cjr.org/year/93/2/iraqgate.asp

[woodpam]

That's an excellent link ABsolution - I hadn't heard that Matrix Churchill were Iraqi owned as the article alleges. It's not surprising really that when Iran and the Ayatollahs became the epitome of evil in the eyes of the U.S. they armed Iran's greatest enemy, Iraq. The French supplied them with a nuclear reactor and the UK government were thoroughly discredited in the Matrix churchill case when it transpired that they knew exactly what was being exported to Iraq. Perhaps the prospect of an alliance with oil rich Iraq was just too much temptation for all the governments concerned; certainly none of the countries mentioned have clean hands in this affair. The justification for all the arms sales has always been "if we don't sell to them someone else will" which may be true, but they ultimately cost us far more in economic and humanitarian terms than any profits they make.