Weinberger: U.S. Didn't Arm Iraq

NewsMax.com ^ | 2/10/03 | Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff

[kattracks]

Former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger emphatically denied on Monday that the Reagan administration had ever supplied Iraq with weapons of any kind during the 1980s.

The charge that President Reagan supplied Saddam Hussein with the precursors for weapons of mass destruction is a favorite of the anti-war left. But Weinberger told nationally syndicated radio talker Sean Hannity that there was no truth to the allegation during the following exchange:

HANNITY: This question keeps coming up about the Reagan years and America; that we're the ones that armed Saddam. That's what the leftists are saying. Can you address this once and for all?

WEINBERGER: Yes, I certainly will. We were in a situation at that time where Iraq had invaded Iran. We were no friend of Iran. Iran had kept our hostages for hundreds of days. On the other hand we didn't want Iraq to be the ruling power in the region because we knew very well what kind of a government they had and what kind of leadership they had.

So our role was primarily to ensure that neither one won and that it would be essentially a stalemate. And that's essentially what happened. In the final weeks Iraq decided it couldn't win and then they sued for peace and kind of an uneasy peace settled down.

But we didn't treat them to weapons or anything of that kind. Some of our companies tried to do that. Some of them probably violated our export control rules. But we in the government certainly did not. And we certainly tried our best to prevent them from getting any weapons on either side. (End of Excerpt)

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Media Bias
Saddam Hussein/Iraq

[and the horse you rode in on]

The only way in which we may - and I say may, because I think it is difficult to know the exact events from outside - have helped them significantly was by giving them some satellite recon info on Iranian troop movements and positions, particularly during that critical period in which it looked as if the Iranians might win.

In case some have forgotten, American middle men who thought they had our governments aproval to sell arms to Iraq ended up in Federal Prison. The arms were bought from Belgium and south Africa. The French wanted the business, but had nothing suitable to sell.

[John H K]

Had Iraq lost the war (and it was possible for them to have lost catastrophically) it's within the realm of possibility that Iran basically could have annexed the entire country, then gone after Kuwait and Saudi, in which case we would have ended up fighting the Gulf War against the Iranians...

In which case many of the same people fabricating the concept that the US armed Iraq today would have been complaining that we should have helped the Iraqis in the first place.