The UN played no small role in all this.  In the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that sent the U.S.-allied Shah of Iran into exile, and then seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran (holding American diplomats and military guards hostage for 444 days — until the day that it was announced that Ronald Reagan had been elected as U.S. president), the U.S. was very, very angry with Iran, and had support from most of the world.  After all, by its seizure of diplomatic premises and holding of diplomatic personnel as hostages, the Islamic Republic had very seriously violated the Vienna Conventions.  

When Saddam invaded Iran, the U.S. was still very, very angry.  It gave tacit and apparently also covert support to Iraq — as did many other countries.  This was expressed in the UN by the inaction or very partial actions of the UN Security Council, and also in the UN General Assembly (the late Ismat Kittani — an Iraqi though also a Kurd, and a former UN staff member as well as Iraqi diplomat — was even elected President of the UNGA in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war). 

The UN Security Council could not, in its first pronouncments on the issue, even agree to admit that Iraq had used chemical weapons against its own people — something that U.S. officials mention on a daily basis nowadays. 

A contemporary account in the New York Times (written by Patrick Tyler), based on a CIA report that was apparently a very partial attempt at disinformation, even said that Iran should also be accused, as it had used chemican and nerve weapons, too. 

As it is impossible to really retract something once it is published, traces of this CIA report, and this NY Times article, and other pieces derived from it, are still floating around today.

At the time, all Iran wanted, to agree to stop fighting, was a clear condemnation by the international community of the “aggressor” in what Iranian officials called “the imposed war” with Iraq.

They have never gotten this from the UN. 

(Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, on behalf of President Bill Clinton, and then President George W. Bush, however, have since named Iraq as the agressor — many long years later.  But. U.S. officials still do not like to think of the effect that this war had on Iran, and on the region.) 

One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad – at America’s request. [Who is this?  Why won't Robert Fisk tell?  How was he put in touch with this man?  Why did the U.S. Pentagon give this man the satellite photos of Iranian troop positions?]
‘Mr Fisk… at the very beginning of the war [n.b. the Iran-Iraq war], in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon,’ he said. ‘There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments – thousands of them – all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!’

I was with Saddam’s forward commandos at the time, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers called him ‘General’ – the rank awarded him by Saddam after that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington’s intelligence information.

Iran’s official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP’s correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. ‘We started counting – we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting,’ he said. ‘We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again … The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination – the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies … the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That’s why they spat blood.’

At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America’s complicity in this atrocity remain secret – Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan’s point-men at this period – although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported document, ‘United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War’, stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, and Escherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: ‘The United States provided the Government of Iraq with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including … chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment.’

Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer – one of 60 American officers who were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments – to visit the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from the Iranians.

He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis ‘was not a matter of deep strategic concern’.  I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital train back to Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs – the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows – and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter of Shia villagers, not for his war crimes against Iran. [What?]

We still don’t know – and with Saddam’s execution we will probably never know – the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of American weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m.  By 1987, Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit.  By 1990, just before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had grown to $3.5bn a year.

Pressed by Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary of State, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended to drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day Iraq – pushed for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.

In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was using the very chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged. Within a month of Bazoft’s arrest William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, said: ‘I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly… A few more Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult.‘

Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on British arms sales to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote, because ‘it would look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales’.

Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark when, on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack on the American frigate, killing more than a sixth of the crew and almost sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam’s excuse that the ship was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and allowed Saddam to refuse their request to interview the Iraqi pilot.

The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever”. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2114403.ece

If phosporous is not banned by international conventions, it should be.

Norway and Switzerland paid for the month-long investigation in Lebanon. UNEP reports that “The decision to undertake a post conflict assessment follows a request in early August from the Lebanese Ministry of the Environment.” It is, of course, easier for UNEP to make its announcement confirming Israel’s use of phosphorous weapons in Lebanon this past summer, after Israel already admitted it.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on 22 October, in an article written by Meron Rapoport, that: “Israel has acknowledged for the first time that it attacked Hezbollah targets during the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. White phosphorus causes very painful and often lethal chemical burns to those hit by it, and until recently Israel maintained that it only uses such bombs to mark targets or territory. The announcement that the Israel Defense Forces had used phosphorus bombs in the war in Lebanon was made by Minister Jacob Edery, in charge of government-Knesset relations. He had been queried on the matter by MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz-Yahad) … Edery said: ‘The IDF made use of phosphorous shells during the war against Hezbollah in attacks against military targets in open ground’. Edery also pointed out that international law does not forbid the use of phosphorus and that ‘ the IDF used this type of munitions according to the rules of international law’. Edery did not specify where and against what types of targets phosphorus munitions were used.”

The Haaretz article also reported that: “Phosphorus has been used by armies since World War I. During World War II and Vietnam the U.S. and British armies made extensive use of phosphorus. During recent decades the tendency has been to ban the use of phosphorus munitions against any target, civilian or military, because of the severity of the injuries that the substance causes. Some experts believe that phosphorus munitions should be termed Chemical Weapons (CW) because of the way the weapons burn and attack the respiratory system. As a CW, phosphorus would become a clearly illegal weapon. International Red Cross is of the opinion that there should be a complete ban on phosphorus being used against human beings and the third protocol of the Geneva Convention on Conventional Weapons restricts the use of ‘incendiary weapons’, with phosphorus considered to be one such weapon. Israel and the United States are not signatories to the Third Protocol. In November 2004 the U.S. Army used phosphorus munitions during an offensive in Faluja, Iraq … Initially the U.S. denied that it had used phosphorus bombs against humans, but then acknowledged that during the assault targets that were neither civilian nor population concentrations were hit with such munitions. Israel also says that the use of incendiary munitions are not in themselves illegal”.  The Haaretz article on phosphorus use in warfare is here. l

The British newspaper The Independent reported on 23 October that “Israel has been accused by both the UN and human rights groups of firing up to four million cluster bombs into Lebanon during its war with Hizbollah, which ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire on 14 August. UN de-mining experts say up to one million of the cluster bombs failed to explode immediately and continue to threaten civilians, especially children who can mistake the ordnance for batteries or other small objects.” This article on Israel’s cluster bomb use in Lebanon in 2006 is here.

The Independent’s veteran correspondent Robert Fisk reported on 28 October that: “Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas – until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air. I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer – except for ‘marking’ targets – even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions … Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of government-parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against Hizbollah, adding that “according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorised and the (Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms”. Asked by The Independent if the Israeli army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said: ‘Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorised by international law or international conventions’. This, however, begs more questions than it answers.” Robert Fisk’s article in the Independent on Israel’s use of phosphorous weapons in Lebanon is here.

An excellent summary of reporting on white phosphorous, which illuminates how its use could be legal (for marking enemy positions, or masking of friendly troop movements), and how its use is not legal (when used as a weapon against human beings), see FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) Extra! of March-April 2006, Now It’s a Chemical Weapon, Now It’s Not: White phosphorus and the siege of Fallujah, also by Seth Ackerman is published here. .

In this report, Ackerman writes that: “On the excruciating effects of the substance, which burns the skin to the bone and cannot be extinguished with water, there’s little dispute: A New York Times article from the mid-1990s (3/22/95) explained that despite its ambiguous legal status, white phosphorous is one of “the worst chemical weapons” in existence, and noted that many of its civilian victims during World War II ‘were shot by German troops to end their suffering’.”