Then we come to what I think of as the Big Daddy of them all, probably because it’s significant in my lifetime: the whole process by which we first sold biological and chemical weapons, fabrication equipment (and I mean entire factories), and even satellite intelligence which they then used to bomb the Kurds…and we then spent two decades destabilizing the region and (again!) inflating the bank accounts of military contractors at the unnecessary cost of hundreds of thousands of lives innocent or otherwise.
This one really fascinates me because we literally had public congressional hearings about it in which we seriously dragged out the receipts for things we sold to Iraq like botulism, anthrax, and a host of other nasties. You have Donald Rumsfeld, who would later become Secretary of Defense, unilaterally lobbying to have Iraq removed from the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring nations in the early 1980’s as a specical envoy on behalf of the Reagan Administration. This allowed MIC profiteers – who in what I’m sure is just a giant coincidence also happened to be among the largest contributors to the political campaigns of Reagan and his allies – to sell various fun bits of weaponry to Iraq under the ruse of being “dual-use,” for instance how you can use Anthrax bacteria for agricultural research. The missile fabrication and guidance systems as well as the military intelligence they used to deliver their research projects to the Kurds also had, I imagine, some just barely plausible “other” application.
Now keep in mind this is all happening while we’re also equipping the Iranians, who are at war with the Iraqis and between whom the Kurds are largely stuck, with the equipment to prosecute their war against Iraq. We literally sold the weapons to both sides bumping up against the Iran-Contra scandal mentioned earlier. And that’s not even where it gets craziest.
During the first Gulf War, there was a problem with veterans exhibiting various sorts of symptoms consistent with exposure to biological or chemical agents. There were big ol’ congressional hearings about it, which included a stunning parade of the receipts from our deals with Iraq, some of which continued even after the end of the first Gulf War.
This, we discovered in 1993 during the congressional investigation into what was called “Gulf War Syndrome.” Included in the final report (colloquially called “The Riegle Report” after US Sen. Donald T. Riegle, who chaired the investigation) was a list of nasty little bits of stuff that will curdle your blood if you read it – the very same stuff that we first “suspected” had been “discharged” during Gulf War I, and then we “just knew” that Iraq had, and had used to “gas their own people,” as the precept to the second.
How did we know? It’s like Bill Hicks said, and exactly like that: We looked at the receipts. We sold that stuff to him. That’s how we knew so bad that he had it. We sold it to him, taught him how to use it, taught him how to make more, handed him a big stack of information screaming “THERE’S THE KURDS RIGHT THERE DON’T GO DOING ANYTHING TO THOSE PEOPLE YOU HATE WITH THOSE DEADLY FARM RESEARCH PROJECTS WE GAVE YOU” and then he did and we said “how dare you gas your own people you bastard” and killed him.
Not the story you were probably taught in school, if you’re young enough for this to have been history for you and not ongoing reality.
So one of the genuine problems with conspiracy theories is sometimes they turn out to be legit, and this just feeds the crazier stuff, and you never get to the juicy center of anything until it’s too late.
Maybe…that’s not an accident?
