Chad Irby wrote ...
In article ,

For civilian use. Exactly.

Righty-ho. I may not like some of the people involved in the American
administration of the time, but I don't actually think that they were
as terminally stupid as you appear to believe. Selling 120+
helicopters to Iraq in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war... and you
actually believe that the American government expected that they would
be used for civilian purposes?? A number of your Congressmen certainly
didn't: they objected to the sales on just these grounds.

And you'll note that those helicopters were in the inventory of the
Iraqi army
just before GW2, according to that notorious Commie rag, the _IISS
Military Balance 1990 - 1991_.

Compared to the rest of the stuff everyone else sold, it's damned near
invisible.

Well, we'll disagree on that. I don't think an extra 120 helicopters
on strength is 'damned near invisible'... and it's certainly more than
"...a few small helicopters..."

...and you might note that the use of chemical weapons was part of the
reason we stopped dealing with Iraq in the late 1980s. Our total
involvement with Hussein lasted just four years, as opposed to 30+ for
many of our "allies."

It lasted longer than that: the Reagan administration opened things up
by taking Iraq off its list of terrorist states in 1982, and as late
as 1988 the administration was talking about Iraq's importance to
America. (Richard Armitage at that point told Congress there was no
international law preventing a leader from using WMDs on his own
people.)

In addition, that programme of providing reconnaissance information to
Iraq lasted until at least 1988, according to an NYT investigation on
the topic from last year, and that information was being provided
during operations when gas was known to be used. Essentially, what put
Saddam Hussein on America's bad books was invading Kuwait. Everything
up to that point -- including killing American sailors on the USS
Stark -- was forgivable.

Funny... everyone else says that Halabja was gassed by bombs dropped
from planes.

Well, no, actually they don't... as you say, some people say that
helicopters were used, others do not. None of the HRW reports I've
seen identify the means used to deliver the gas at Halabja, except to
the extent of saying that they were delivered by air. (They do talk
about use of aircraft in conventional attacks, including use of
napalm/phosphorous, earlier that day.)

Scott