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★阿修羅♪
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(回答先: 米国：ブッシュ政権支持率６３％に下落 外交問題で急落 「毎日新聞」 投稿者 ほくめん 日時 2002 年 9 月 08 日 19:05:22)
単なる「外交」問題では、無いのだね。アメリカ政府が、実を言うと、イラン・イラク戦争の間にイラク軍に毒ガスを「売却」していた事が発覚している問題も、アメリカ政府を悩ませてる問題でね。しかし、アメリカ政府は、この問題に「立ち向かおう」とはしないのだね。これは、丸で日本政府の経済政策の様な物でね。
この手の事実が発覚した事が、アメリカ政府を、国内的にも国際的にも、孤立させる要因の一つとなっているね。アメリカは、生物化学兵器生産を禁止した筈の国でね。下にある、イギリスのオブザーバーが掲載した記事は、読んでおいて損は無いね。これもつまり、「大量破壊兵器」が拡散したのは、アメリカ政府の自業自得だと言う事なのだがね。それなら、お互いに、話し合いで解決するべき問題だろうがね。
それでも、日本の地下鉄で宗教団体が使用した毒ガスは、アメリカ製でも自衛隊製でも無かったと言うがね。それは、公式発表ではあるね。それでも、まだまだ、隠された真実が出てくるかも知れないね。
When US turned a blind eye to poison gas
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,784313,00.html
America knew Baghdad was using chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988. So why, asks Dilip Hiro , has it taken 14 years to muster its outrage?
Sunday September 1, 2002
The Observer
When it comes to demonising Saddam Hussein, nothing captures the popular imagination in America better than the statement that 'he gassed his own people'. This is an allusion to the deployment of chemical weapons by Iraq's military in the Iraqi Kurdistan town of Halabja in March 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war, and then in the territory administered by the Tehran-backed Kurdish rebels after the ceasefire five months later.
As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out.
Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula.
That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago. 'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'
In 1986, it was with the aim of recapturing the Fao peninsula, taken by the Iranians in February, that Saddam's military used chemical agents so extensively that the UN Security Council stopped accepting its routine denials. Following an examination of 700 Iranian casualties, UN experts concluded that Baghdad had deployed mustard and nerve gases many times. Instead of condemning Baghdad for this, the Security Council, dominated by Washington and Moscow, both pro-Iraq, coupled its condemnation of Baghdad with its disapproval of 'the prolongation of the war' by Tehran for refusing a truce until the council had named Iraq the aggressor.
Despite its repeated reiteration of neutrality, the US had all along been pro-Baghdad. It lost no time in supplying Iraq with intelligence collected by the Saudi-owned but Pentagon-operated Airborne Warning and Control Systems (Awacs) plying in the region. Once Iraq and the US had resumed diplomatic links after the re-election of Reagan as President in November 1984, the military cooperation blossomed.
Starting in July 1986, aided by the Pentagon, which clandestinely seconded its air force officers to work with their Iraqi counterparts, Saddam's air force greatly improved its targeting accuracy, striking relentlessly the enemy's power plants, factories and bridges, and extending the range of its strikes to Iran's oil terminals in the lower Gulf. Under the rubric of escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers, the US built up an armada in the Gulf, which clashed with the small, under-equipped Iranian navy and sank two Iranian offshore oil platforms in the lower Gulf in retaliation for Iran's missile attack on an American-flagged supertanker docked in Kuwaiti waters.
Against this background, Iraq started hitting Tehran with its upgraded Scud ground-to-ground missiles in late February 1988. To retake Halabja from Iran and its Kurdish allies, who had captured it in March, Iraq's air force attacked it with poison gas bombs. The objective was to take out the occupying Iranian troops (who had by then left the town); instead, the assault killed 3,200 to 5,000 civilians. The images of men, woman and children, frozen in instant death, relayed by the Iranian media, shocked the world. Yet no condemnation came from Washington. It was only when, following the ceasefire with Iran in August, Saddam made widespread use of chemical agents to recapture 4,000 square miles controlled by the Kurdish insurgents that the Security Council decided to dispatch a team to find out if Baghdad had resorted to chemical arms. Saddam refused to cooperate.
But instead of pressuring him to reverse his stand, or face a ban on the sale of American military equipment and advanced technology to Iraq by the revival of the Senate's bill, US Secretary of State George Shultz chose to say only that interviews with the Kurdish refugees in Turkey and 'other sources' (which remained obscure) pointed towards Iraqi use of chemical agents. These two elements did not constitute 'conclusive' evidence. This was the verdict of Shultz's British counterpart, Sir Geoffrey Howe: 'If conclusive evidence is obtained, then punitive measures against Iraq have not been ruled out.' As neither he nor Shultz is known to have made a further move to get at the truth, Iraq went unpunished.
That was the end of the story - until the hawks in the Bush administration recently began bandying about the revolting phrase of 'gassing his own people' for their partisan ends.
· Dilip Hiro is the author of 'Neighbours, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After the Gulf Wars' (Routledge). His latest book is 'War Without End: Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response' (Routledge, £12.99).
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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