What Iranians have known about Jimmy Carter from the beginning

A few days ago, I walked into a local small business owned by a naturalized American citizen who was from Iran. During our conversation, the owner asked me what I thought about the U.S. and Coalition forces invading Iraq.

I said that in my opinion Jimmy Carter and his State Department were totally responsible for this war, Iraq's slaughtering of its own citizens, and the tragic war with Iran.

The shop owner grabbed me and gave me a "bear-hug." He said that in his 20 years living in America, I was the only American who understood what Iranians have known about Jimmy Carter from the beginning.

He agreed with me that Jimmy Carter started the dominoes falling that eventually created the chaos that led to the present and recent wars in the Gulf.

Thousands of Iraqi citizens now fleeing the Gulf II War zone will join thousands of Iranians who fled during the "Reign of Terror" which the Ayatollah Khomeini unleashed after then-President Jimmy Carter decided to make a regime change by pulling U.S. support from the Shah of Iran. The Shah and his administration were suppressing Islamic fundamentalists who wanted to return Iran to the 7th century under Islamic law.

President Carter's advisors were out of touch with reality. Like Don Quixote, they raced in, without regard to reality, to vanquish the Shah and his attempt to modernize Iran.

The consulting company I worked for at that time sent their Iranian office manager and engineering staff to a technical symposium in Pasadena, CA. The staff from our Tehran office was not so concerned about the technical presentation as they were about the pending disaster that President Carter was about to create, since his State Department was removing all support for the Shah. After all, it was argued, the kindly religious leaders of Iran would install a peaceful socialist government and save the country from the upheaval of Westernization.

Our office manager, a Jordanian Christian, recommended that we cease soliciting contracts from the Shah's government because its days were numbered. He recommended finishing the existing construction jobs and moving the office to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was worried we might not be paid for the existing work, and certain we would not be paid for any work done for a replacement government.

We had moved his family to Riyadh and also recommended that all other employees move there for their safety.

When the Shah fell, the Ayatollah Khomeini promised a welfare state that would outshine anything the Shah had done for Iran. Of course, his real objective was to use Iran as a launching pad for radical Islamic rule of the Middle East.

The Ayatollah unleashed a blood bath against his enemies. Americans in the Embassy were taken hostage for 444 days, and the economy of Iran plummeted into chaos.

As the Ayatollah encouraged radical Islamic uprisings in surrounding countries, we decided to contain Iran by using the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. We supplied him with a massive arms buildup, which apparently included chemical, and perhaps even biological, weapons.

The 15,000,000 Iraqis were outnumbered by the 43,000,000 Iranians; but with the weapons we supplied him, Saddam Hussein fought the Iranians to a stalemate. Millions were killed and wounded.

In the first Gulf War hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Kuwaitis were sacrificed by Saddam Hussein. The United Nations Coalition failed to consummate their victory over Saddam Hussein.

We naively thought that the Iraqis would rise up and depose their evil dictator. The majority of Iraq's provinces, with our encouragement, did revolt. However, the United Nations and the United States left these people without the needed military support, and Saddam Hussein annihilated them by the tens of thousands. Thousands of them were killed by poison gas.

Perhaps the most ironic twist in this whole affair is that Jimmy Carter was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Arming Saddam
The Weekly Standard ^ | April 14, 2003 | The Weekly Standard Scrapbook

Posted on 04/09/2003 5:28 PM PDT by forsnax5

Arming Saddam

Two things stood out in the excellent April 2 dispatch from Najaf, Iraq, filed by the New York Times's Jim Dwyer. There was the headline, "Cheers and Smiles for U.S. Troops in a Captured City," which one had not expected to read in the Times. And there was this delicious kicker: "American troops found that the fleeing Baath Party and paramilitary forces had set up minefields on roads and bridges leading out of the city....Lt. Col. Duke Deluca, noting that the mines had been made in Italy, said, 'Europeans are anti-war, but they are pro-commerce.'"

As it happens, Colonel Deluca's point had just been made by the inimitable bilingual blogger and illustrator known as the Dissident Frogman (http://thedissidentfrogman.now.nu). He produced this chart with data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

How the United States armed Saddam Hussein

TOPICS: News/Current Events; Click to Add Topic
KEYWORDS: IRAQ; SADDAM; WEAPONS; Click to Add Keyword

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I've seen lots of comments about how the U.S. armed Saddam in the 80's. This article from the Weekly Standard and the nifty chart from the Dissident Frogman adds a little perspective...

To: forsnax5

Surprised that Germany's sales are near nil.

3 posted on 04/09/2003 5:30 PM PDT by C210N
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To: C210N

Remember, this is for weapons sales only. Trying to find machinery, etc sales elsewhere is a little more difficult.

4 posted on 04/09/2003 6:10 PM PDT by cmsgtusafret
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To: forsnax5

Nice chart.

5 posted on 04/09/2003 6:15 PM PDT by k2blader ("Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful." - C. S. Lewis)
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To: forsnax5

Looks like there are certain UN security council members that sponser terror

6 posted on 04/09/2003 6:20 PM PDT by joesnuffy (Moderate Islam Is For Dilettantes)
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To: forsnax5

adds a little perspective

Adds a little perspective, my butt. It exposes it as a lie. What else are they lying about? (Rhetorical question)

7 posted on 04/09/2003 6:23 PM PDT by 1L
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To: forsnax5

Looks like there are certain UN security council members that sponsor terror

8 posted on 04/09/2003 6:26 PM PDT by joesnuffy (Moderate Islam Is For Dilettantes)
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To: C210N

Excuse me if I don't believe the German percentages. No one ever said the Germans were dumb, only evil when it is profitable to be so. We've heard repeatedly that the bunkers were built by German engineers. I doubt they stopped with sending blueprints on how to pour concrete and form steel.

9 posted on 04/09/2003 6:27 PM PDT by pepperdog (God Bless and Protect our Troops)
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To: forsnax5

read later

10 posted on 04/09/2003 7:43 PM PDT by LiteKeeper
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To: forsnax5

The "we armed Iraq in the 1980's" is a constant excuse used by the Left to argue against war against Saddam. While Saddam did get limited military support, most of what he got during the Iraq/Iran war was intelligence information. In fact, the evidence of this was the Gulf War in 1991...which wasn't too far from when our outrageous military support supposedly occurred. But, just how much US-made military equipment did you see used against our troops in the Gulf War? How many US made tanks did you see? Their troops were using AK-47s, not M-16s; their tanks were Soviet TU-type tanks and their aircrafts were Soviet and French made MIGs and Mirages. Seriously...think about that. If we had given this regime so much of our military equipment...the best in the world, why were they using someone elses?

And even if we did, it's irrelevant. We also armed Stalin during WWII with the Lend-Lease Act but that didn't preclude us from engaging in a Cold War, immediately after WWII ended. Even shortly before WWII, when we knew of the atrocities being committed in China, the Japanese were still getting steel to build their ships and fuel to power them from the USA. Throughout history, friends have become enemies and enemies have become friends...but that shouldn't preclude us from reacting to a dangerous situation. Using this argument, the British should've remained our enemies...those dirty Redcoats.

And this crap about giving Saddam Bio/Chemical "weapons" is an exaggeration as well. Saddam never got "weaponized" nerve agents or "weaponzed" biological agents from the USA. Everything he got from us was a cooperative (UN and Western nations) effort to help Iraq deal with the rampant spread of contagious diseases and viruses that were killing his people. While this did include biological samples of viruses, this was a standard practice with the ATCC (American Type Culture Collection) and other medical institutions as they sent samples to medical researchers around the world...so they could develop immunizing agents to battle these diseases.

This was especially of interest for Baghdad University and the Ministry of Higher Education (not Saddam) as they appealed to the UN, CDC and WHO for help in controlling the spread of Brucellosis, Diphtheria, Hepatitis, Cholera, TB and any number of contagious diseases. Much of these so-called "chemicals" were also based on the same principal of fighting disease...which included chlorines and pesticides that could be used in water treatment facilities and in agriculture to contain the spread of disease. Before the concern over bio/chem warfare, these were common practices that medical researchers engaged in world wide. Saddam never got instructions from the US on how to weaponize these agents. That, he got from the USSR which was revealed shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The documents released uncovered that the Soviets engaged in the deadliest bio/chem weapons research the world has ever seen...including "cocktails" which was the mixing of deadly pathogens that made them resistant to vaccines and standard protections.

In hindsight, what the "USA" did was obviously a stupid thing, but it was not illegal...and if it was, the Senate Banking Committee, who actually investigated these charges, would've brought charges and prosecuted those who participated. While they did acknowledge bio-material transfers to Iraq, nothing was done outside the law that existed at that time. But there has been a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue of biological samples, which we did supply legally and deadly chemical materials, which we didn't. While one report says the US government was aware of Saddam's ambitions for "chemical" weapons exploitation as early as the early 1980's, a UN report states that Saddam's "biological" weapons program wasn't initiated until mid-1986 at Salman Pak. And this wasn't acknowledged until after the Gulf War, when the inspectors hit the ground and did their investigations. Now this is important because there has been a deliberate diception by some to say that if we knew about Saddam's chemical weapons, why did we continue to give him more. Number one, we didn't give him chemical weapons; number two, there was no evidence at that time that he was working on "biological" weapons. As the UN report states, he started that in mid-1986...and even then, it wasn't learned until "after" the Gulf War. The attacks on the Kurds and Shi'ites were by chemical weapons...not biological weapons. But that didn't matter because this was enough for some to infer that we continued to supply Saddam with weapons to kill his people.

Unfortunately, this was all the ammunition the left needed to accuse the US of arming Saddam with bio/chem weapons. There is a great article the debunks this myth and explains the details in these transfers. And even though anthrax was a part of these transfers, these transfers had been occurring since the late 1960's and was common practice within the medical community, before the fear of bio/chem warfare. Heck, from what I understand, anthrax is a spore that can be found in Nature.

Unfortunately, nowadays, anyone can turn chlorine and pesticide into a deadly aerosol weapon...and fertilizer into a explosive device. This is a far cry, however, from the Sarin and Mustard Gas that was used by Saddam on the Kurds and Shi'ites. And the USA never gave Saddam these deadly nerve agents. You wouldn't know that, though, from reading the accusations and articles of others. According to them, we gave Saddam these "weaponized" materials. This is nothing but the same liberal clap-trap that looks to blame Smith & Wesson (or any other gun manuafacturer) for the death of an individual because another individual used that product irresponsibly, malisciously...or in Saddam's case, other than how the product was intended to be used. I could be wrong, but from what I've read, I see alot of people connecting dots that don't exist. I think this chart goes further to mitigate these charges, as well.

11 posted on 04/11/2003 12:58 PM PDT by cwboelter
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