A reminder: where did the gas Saddam used on Halabja (Northern-Iraq/Kurdistan) and on Iran come from?http://en.wikipedia.org/
"The know-how and material for developing chemical weapons were obtained by Saddam's regime from foreign sources.[24] The largest suppliers of precursors for chemical weapons production were in Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), and West Germany (1,027 tons). One Indian company, Exomet Plastics, sent 2,292 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq. The Singapore -based firm Kim Al-Khaleej, affiliated to the United Arab Emirates, supplied more than 4,500 tons of VX, sarin, and mustard gas precursors and production equipment to Iraq.[25] Dieter Backfisch, managing director of West German company Karl Kolb GmbH, was quoted by saying in 1989: "For people in Germany poison gas is something quite terrible, but this does not worry customers abroad."[24]"
And what did the world do? Close to nothing in the case of Halabja ('Saddam's own people') or just nothing in the case of Iran, or in fact rather encouraging to go on.
In fact the US in the person of Rumsfeld (1983) had provided Saddam rather a license. http://www2.gwu.edu/~
This is not to put into a lesser perspective any of the completely justified indignation about what happened east of Damascus, but to put the indignation of some into perspective. And in fact in Gaza and Lebanon clusterbombs and phosphorus were used, and what about depleted uranium and napalm, becoming household names in respectively the US led war on Iraq and on Vietnam. There are absolute red lines, but there are many, and the perspective on what is absolute often changes.
Oh and 'Among the chemical precursors provided to Iraq from American companies such as Alcolac International and Phillips, was thiodiglycol, a substance needed to manufacture mustard gas, according to leaked portions of Iraq's "full, final and complete" disclosure of the sources for its weapons programs. The provision of chemical precursors from United States companies to Iraq was enabled by a Ronald Reagan Administration policy that removed Iraq from the State Department's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Alcolac was named as a defendant in the Aziz v. Iraq case presently pending in the United States District Court (Case No. 1:09-cv-00869-MJG). (Both companies have since undergone reorganization and Phillips, once a subsidiary of Phillips Petroleum is now part of ConocoPhillips, an American oil and discount fossil fuel company, while Alcolac International has since dissolved and reformed as Alcolac Inc.[28])' Thiodiglycol is a multi-purpose chemical agent, but apparently yet the Reagan administration deliberately included the possibility of the stuff being used for chemical weapons.
Oh and recently the US sold cluster bombs to Saudi-Arabia.
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