I donno why, but today's attack against 'loyalist Syria', and the US's complacency, strikes a HARSH resemblance to the US's stance on Halabja & its support for Saddam Hussein!
"... Halabja marked something of a turning point in the United States’ scandalous support for Saddam Husayn’s war of aggression against the Islamic Republic—including his use of chemical weapons against civilian as well as military targets. Ever since the Iraqi military had started using chemical weapons in 1982 and Iran had started complaining about it to the United Nations Security Council, the United States had blocked any Security Council action on the matter. As we recount in Going to Tehran, UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, acting on his own (because the Security Council wouldn’t support him), sent six fact-finding teams to investigate Iraq’s use of chemical weapons between 1984 and 1988. Their reports consistently confirmed Iran’s charges—and just as consistently, the United States refused to let the Council act. As then Secretary of State George Shultz later explained, Washington blocked international pressure on Iraq to stop using chemical weapons because “you don’t want Iran to win the war.”..."
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While the War College report acknowledges that Iraq used mustard gas during the Halabja hostilities, it notes that mustard gas is an incapacitating, rather than a killing agent, with a fatality rate of only 2%, so that it could not have killed the hundreds of known dead, much less the thousands of dead claimed by Human Rights Watch.
According to the War College reconstruction of events, Iran struck first taking control of the village. The Iraqis counter-attacked using mustard gas. The Iranians then attacked again, this time using a "blood agent" - cyanogens chloride or hydrogen cyanide - and re-took the town, which Iran then held for several months.
Having control of the village and its grisly dead, Iran blamed the gas deaths on the Iraqis, and the allegations of Iraqi genocide took root via a credulous international press and, a little later, cynical promotion of the allegations for political purposes by the US state department and Senate.
Stephen Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war, closely studied evidences of "genocide in Halabja" has described his group's findings:
"The great majority of the victims seen by reporters and other observers who attended the scene were blue in their extremities. That means that they were killed by a blood agent, probably either cyanogens chloride or hydrogen cyanide. Iraq never used and lacked any capacity to produce these chemicals. But the Iranians did deploy them. Therefore the Iranians killed the Kurds."
Pelletiere's report also said that international relief organisations that examined the Kurdish refugees in Turkey failed to discover any gassing victims.
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