The Pentagon has admitted to an airstrike that is believed to have killed more than 200 civilians in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, at the edge of the autonomous Kurdistan region.
In the 1980s, Kurdistan was targeted by Saddam Hussein, then-president of Iraq, because the Kurds supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. After his capture in the second Gulf War, Hussein was charged by the U.S. occupational government with genocide, convicted, and hung for his crimes.
What is lesser known is that at the same time, the U.S. government, still fuming after the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis (a populist reaction to the brutality of the U.S.-backed dictator Mohammad Reza Shah, and a major factor in Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election), was a major – and thoroughly documented – supporter of Hussein in the war:
Iraq began receiving support from the United States and west European countries as well. Saddam was given diplomatic, monetary, and military support by the US, including massive loans, political clout, and intelligence on Iranian deployments gathered by American spy satellites. The Iraqis relied heavily on American satellite footage and radar planes to detect Iranian troop movements, and they enabled Iraq to move troops to the site before the battle.
With Iranian success on the battlefield, the US made its backing of Iraq more pronounced, supplying intelligence, economic aid, and dual-use equipment and vehicles, as well as normalizing its intergovernmental relations (which had been broken during the 1967 Six-Day War). President Ronald Reagan decided that the United States “could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran”, and that the United States “would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran”. Reagan formalised this policy by issuing a National Security Decision Directive to this effect in June 1982.
In 1982, Reagan removed Iraq from the list of countries “supporting terrorism” and sold weapons such as howitzers to Iraq via Jordan and Israel. France sold Iraq millions of dollars worth of weapons, including Gazelle helicopters, Mirage F-1 fighters, and Exocet missiles. Both the United States and West Germany sold Iraq dual-use pesticides and poisons that would be used to create chemical and other weapons, such as Roland missiles.
Although the U.S. government began to play both sides a few years later in the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA nevertheless threw its support heavily to the Iraqi government utilizing internationally banned chemical weapons in its campaign against Iran.
Precursors to chemical weapons, as well as biological weapons, cluster bombs, and the loans to pay for them, were brokered to Iraq by pharmaceutical representative Donald Rumsfeld, who would later be appointed Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration. The Bush administration would go on to invade Iraq in 2003 citing as a primary motivation its possession of such “weapons of mass destruction”.
By 2014 it became well known that many a true word was spoken in such jest: Iraq did in fact have WMDs, and they were obtained from the United States itself. (The truth, however, was revealed in the context of whipping up a new war against the terrorist organization ISIL, so the media still gets zero points for honesty.)
Until now, the Kurds have been major supporters of U.S. interests in the Middle East, perceiving the U.S. as a liberator and protector pursuant to their darkest hour in 1988.
Is the U.S. military going to burn one of its few remaining bridges in the Middle East by invoking the “collateral damage” doctrine in this instance? How will Kurds, tough fighters to the core, react to their family members being wiped out in reckless bombings?
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