According to a New York Times article today, the Islamic State has employed WMDs against Iraqi police officers. The specific WMD used is chlorine gas. According to reports, ISIS forces set off an explosion that released the gas, causing injuries to 11 Iraqi police officers.
Alistair Baskey, a spokesman for the National Security Council, observed:
The use of chlorine as a chemical weapon is an abhorrent act. These recent allegations underscore the importance of our work to eliminate chemical weapons in this violate region.”
What planet is Baskey living on? It certainly can’t be Planet Earth. Where does he think those chemical weapons came from? Does he think they just mysteriously dropped in the laps of the Islamic State?
No, as I pointed out in my blog post of October 15, those chemical weapons came from the United States as part of the U.S. government’s partnership during the 1980s with Saddam Hussein.
That’s right — those infamous WMDs that were used as George W. Bush’s excuse for invading Iraq came from the United States. That’s why Bush was so certain that they would “find” WMDs in Iraq. He had the receipts for them.
Why did the U.S. deliver that chlorine gas and other chemical and biological weapons to Iraq?
So that Saddam could use them to kill Iranians.
Why did U.S. officials want Saddam to use chlorine gas and other WMDs to kill Iranians?
Because U.S. officials were still angry over the fact that the Iranian people have ousted from power their brutal dictator, the Shah of Iran, whom U.S. officials had installed into power with the CIA’s coup in 1953 that destroyed Iran’s experiment with democracy. In fact, they’re still angry about it to this day.
Now, let’s revisit that pointed observation by Baskey:
The use of chlorine as a chemical weapon is an abhorrent act.
Questions for Baskey: Why is the use of chlorine gas considered good when it is used by a pro-U.S. dictator against the Iranian people and considered bad when it is used by an anti-U.S. group against a U.S.-installed regime in Iraq? Why isn’t it equally bad in both instances?
As the New York Times recently disclosed in a shocking story, it turns out that from 2004-2008 President George W. Bush and his people did discover the old WMD caches that the U.S. had delivered to Saddam Hussein. The canisters containing the gases were old and rusting out.
Wouldn’t you think that Bush and Vice President Cheney, the Pentagon, and the CIA would trumpet that WMD find, using it to justify their invasion of Iraq?
Not so! They instead ordered soldiers to keep it secret, an order that was fulfilled until the New York Times revealed the truth a few days ago.
Why would they want such a find to be kept secret? There is one likely reason: They didn’t want the American people to figure out that it was the U.S. who delivered those WMDs to Saddam so that he could use them to kill Iranians.
Here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, we alluded to this in 2003 in an article entitled “Where Did Iraq Get It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction?”
Needless to say, that was during a time when many Americans didn’t want to hear discomforting things about their federal government, especially with respect to foreign policy.
And so now we have the ultimate in blowback. In fact, one might call it “The Mother of All Blowbacks.”
The U.S. government invades Iraq under a bogus WMD threat in order to garner support for a regime change against its old partner and ally, Saddam Hussein, to whom the U.S. had given WMDs so that Saddam could use them to kill Iranians.
The WMDs are ultimately found but U.S. officials keep the find secret from the American people and the rest of the world. Even worse, they fail to destroy the WMDs.
The U.S. government’s ouster of Saddam Hussein unleashes a violent civil war in which the Islamic State is trying to oust the U.S.-installed regime in Iraq.
The Islamic State finds those WMDs and uses them against the U.S.-installed Iraqi regime, while U.S. officials publicly condemn the use of the WMDs that the U.S. delivered to Saddam to kill Iranians.
Just one more big blowback success story in the history of U.S. interventionism.