Some background on Iraq's chemical weapon history:

In March 1988, the Iranian & Iraqi armies had a battle near the border-town of Halabja. Witnesses claimed both sides used chemical weapons. While the soldiers on both sides had protective gear (e.g. gas masks), the Kurdish civilians did not, and over 5,000 of them were killed (some reports say the number dead was as high as 7,000). The initial reports from Human Rights Watch claimed that the Iraqis were the ones who gassed the Kurds, and that this was intentional.

In July 1988, 4 months later, Bechtel was hired by Saddam Hussein's government to build a huge petrochemical complex that would give Iraq the ability to generate chemical weapons. (prior to this, most of their chemical and biological weapons had been purchased from the Washington-based company American Type Culture Collection)

That same month, the United States congress (both houses) voted in favor of sanctions against Iraq. President Reagan vetoed the bill, citing a report which had been prepared by DOD which concluded that the gas that killed the Kurds was the type that the Iranians were using, and thus the Iranians had gassed the Kurds, not the Iraqis.

So instead of sanctions, President Reagan approved guaranteed loans for Iraq in the amount of $2 billion, meaning if Iraq was to default, the loans would be paid by US taxpayers.

The money was borrowed from the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, and was guaranteed by the Federal government through the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corporation, which is meant to be used to guarantee loans to foreign governments for food purchases from US farmers. Instead, the money was paid directly to Bechtel and was used to build the PC2 Petrochemical Complex south of Baghdad. In the summer of 1990, after the UN imposed sanctions on Iraq, they defaulted on this loan.

So in 1991 after the Gulf War, when the UN inspectors went into Iraq, guess where they found most of the Chemical Weapons had been produced? You bet!

Since the current war in Iraq started, Bechtel has received over $2.8 billion in rebuilding contracts.


So here's a summary:

US taxpayers paid an American company hundreds of millions of dollars to build a huge chemical weapons factory in Iraq, 4 months after the crazy Iraqi leader had already been accused of killing over 5,000 of his own citizens using chemical weapons.

Then, 15 years later, US taxpayers are now paying this same American company over 2 billion dollars to rebuild Iraq after the US destroyed and invaded the country under the pretext of preventing Iraq from developing biological and chemical weapons.

Good job!

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time posting in political threads in the lounge...