There is the claim made that, during the Cold War, we backed Iraq and the Soviet Union backed Iran. According to this claim, we are the ones that enabled Saddam to obtain WMDs.
So if that is true, why would Russia be giving WMDs to Iraq? Historically, hasn't Russian been against Iraq and for Iran?
I am confused on this claim that the Russians gave WMDs to Iraq.
Iraq was armed by the Soviets, and were still a major factor during the first Gulf War - which is why I believe it was out of deference to them that we did not pursue the enemy and destroy them.
That is not true. The USSR armed Iraq. The USA armed Iran up until 1979. After that, the USSR armed both. The USA gave some intelligence to Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war.
I'm sorry, you have it reversed, sort of.
Until the fall of the shah of Iran, we backed Iran, and Saddam was a soviet client. His army was soviet trained and soviet equipped. It was still soviet armed right up until the 2003 invasion.
Where it gets complicated was after the fall of the Shah, and the rise of the Ayatollah. At that point, the Saudis became terrified that Iran would invade them. At the same time, Saddam saw a chance to take Iran's arab southwest away from them, and started a war. The Saudis funded that war, and since we were very tightly allied with Saudi Arabia, it became our policy to make sure Saddam didn't lose his war.
But we sold him no armament. We did sell "dual-use" equipment, civilian equipment that could have military applications (like trucks, engines, and so forth). Our primary contribution was intelligence, making sure Saddam always knew where the Iranian troops were massing.
But it would be a mistake to say we were Saddam's ally; we were Saudi Arabia's ally. The moment Saddam became a threat to the Saudis, we dropped him so fast his head spun. He had offered us entry into his oil industry, and we had major projects on the books when he invaded Kuwait. Which is why he didn't believe we would take sides against him. But given the choice between Saddam and the Saudis, it was no contest.
In 1991 when we fought him, his weaponry was almost 100% Soviet. In 2003, when we fought him for the second time, his weaponry was 70% Russian, 20% French, 9% miscellaneous, and 1% US.
During the long Iran-Iraq war that lasted through much of the nineteen eighties the Soviet Union was the preponderant arms supplier to Iraq (with the French second). The Iraqi Baath party was Socialist and maintained a long and friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, and later with Russia. We should remember that Russia is in reality an Asian state with a large (20 million) Muslim population.
Free market, they sell to whoever buys.
Actually, from the mid '50s until the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran was a very strong ally - The Shah was a friend of the United States until Jimmy Carter stabbed him in the back.
So if that is true, why would Russia be giving WMDs to Iraq? Historically, hasn't Russian been against Iraq and for Iran?
I am confused on this claim that the Russians gave WMDs to Iraq.
In the world of geopolitics, there's no such thing as eternal alliances. During World War II we were the Soviet Union's ally, the instant the war ended we went back to being enemies. When the SU invaded Afghanistan, we supplied the Taliban with the weaponry needed to drive them out.
Once the Soviet Union collapsed, all the old alliances came to end and everything changed. Russia's primary need was to make money by selling off equipment to anyone willing to buy it.
That was about the Reagan Administration helping Iran by selling them misslies to use against Iraq.
The Reagan policy was based on the fact that Both Iran and Iraq were our enemies and they were at war with each Other. The Reagan policy was to help which ever one was losing at the time.
Reagan reasoned that if two of our enemies were fighting it was in our interests to keep them fighting. Thus we helped which ever nation was losing.