Forum Lurker:

"Teribus, you should try reading some of the books that have been published by the Department of Defense's former researchers. Even in what isn't classified, they admit to having developed biological and chemical weapons for tactical and strategic uses, and created battle plans for using them. It is also common knowledge, admitted by the U.S. government, that they supplied Saddam with the chemical munitions he used against Iran."

When? - I believe that might have been true a long, long time ago. They would analyse and research the effectiveness of such weapons and look at tactical and strategic applications of them, in order to develope counter-measures - they did Tactical Nuclear weapons. The US and UK have NO chemical, bacteriological, biological weapons.

MGOH:

"Saddam is a horrible ruler, and he was a horrible ruler at the time when he was being backed to the hilt by the US and UK governments. All the atrocities Old Guy rightly finds so terrible were happening back then, and nobody seemed to give a damn, except the same kind of peoiple youi find marching agains the war today. Donald Rumsfeld certainly didn't have any qualms about sitting down and arranging to help Saddam get weapons and money and backup for his biological and chemical production facilities."

He was also backed to the hilt by the Russians, Chinese, French and Germans. If memory serves me correctly I cannot remember any anti-Saddam marches during the eighties. The assistance given by the US during the Iran-Iraq war in relation to CB weapons was intended for use in programmes to improve Iraq's capacity to withstand attack by such weapons and to improve passive counter-measures should any of Iraq's own production facilities and weapons storage areas were hit (Saddam's CB weapons capabilities were supplied by others).

In all the articles supplied as providing proof that the US supplied Iraq with CB weapons, not one actually states that. As I have said earlier in this thread - the UK has not had any such weapons capability since the mid-1960's, but we did develope extremely effective passive counter-measures to enable our troops to withstand such attacks.

The focus on all the threads related to this subject and many more is anti-Bush, pure and simple, without any regard for objective analysis in relation to world events. To his most vociferous detractors - you have an election coming up in 2004. Personally I believe he is doing a good job, a necessary job, for the benefit of all - with the exception of terrorist groups thinking of going international, and Saddam Hussein.

Last night the national leaders of the countries comprising the EU agreed that inspections should continue on the premise that the inspections were not open-ended - i.e. there is a time limit. Again personally I think the UN should give Saddam a clear deadline for full and verified compliance, after which he must be left in no doubt that military action will follow immediately. That action would be taken with two clearly defined objectives - firstly, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power combined with the abolition of the Ba'ath Party and its apparatus of terror - secondly, the total disarmament of Iraq.

The same thing happened to Germany at the end of WW II - the results I believe proved to be beneficial.