The Prole Museum
WELCOME TO THE PROLE
Welcome, ladies and gents, and step right in. Mind the ropes, kids. I am Zero, your tour guide. Yes, you've walked into a most wondrous place—the Prole Museum of Dubious Facts. Prepare yourself to be amazed, enlightened, and stupefied—at least two out of three. Join me now, as we explore the variegated mysteries of Dubious Facts versus Inconvenient Truths.
Saddam Hussein
Dubious Fact: "Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destructiion which he used against his own people."
On September 22, 1980, Iraq (led by Saddam Hussein) invaded Iran (led by the Ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeni), thus starting the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War. The war lasted until August 20, 1988. It was a bloody, ruthless war in which Iraq used chemical weapons (WMD's), including nerve gas, against more than 100,000 Iranian military and civilian victims. By the end, the war had killed over one million Iranians.
The United States was officially neutral, but secretly leaned against Iran, in part because of animosity left over from the Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-81). Also, President George H.W. Bush wished to protect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia (with whom the Bush family had a close relationship) against Iran. The Bush Administration publicly denounced Saddam's use of WMD's, but secretly supported Iraq.
In December 1983, a special U.S. presidential envoy—Donald Rumsfeld—travelled to Iraq and met with Saddam, to pave the way for the normalization of U.S.-Iraq relations. In 1984, in an attempt to help "avert an Iraqi collapse," the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began providing Saddam with biological materials—viruses, retroviruses, bacteria, fungi, tissues infected with bubonic plague, and several types of West Nile virus.
Saddam used WMD's against "his own people" in March 1988 when the Iran-Iarq War was still going on. Iran had occupied an Iraqi town of Iraqi Kurds, called Halabja. Saddam dropped chemical bombs on Halabja, killing over 5,000 Kurds. (U.S. intelligence sources told the Los Angeles Times that the poison gas was sprayed on the Kurds by U.S. helicopters sold to Iraq for crop dusting.)
Darrell Whitchurch says, "We know Saddam used WMD's because we have the receipts." And what about the nonexistent WMD's for mushroom clouds in 2003? Ah, that's another story, for another time.
SOURCE: Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (Scribner, 2004). Also see: Wikipedia, "Iran-Iraq War."
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