Originally posted by Mr Carrot
The UK and US sold Iraq chemical components that could be used to make chemical weapons or facilities to produce them. They did NOT sell them the weapons directly.
No, of course, they just shown how to make them, and provided the components.
Mmh, a proof. Let me open google, it should take less than a minute. Ok, here we go:
"The U.S. was far from innocent. In 1988, the Unisys Corporation sold Saddam a giant, $8.7 million dollar computer system configured as a "personnel database" - in other words, set up to track Iraqi citizens. Unisys sold it directly to Saddam's Ministry of the Interior, home to his secret police. Unisys also sold high-speed computers to the Ministry of Defense and to the Saddam State Establishment, that cranked out components for missiles and nuclear weapons. Our electronics went to every known nuclear and missile site in Iraq. These included the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, Iraqi sites that made A-bomb fuel and nuclear weapon detonators, as well as Iraq's main missile research complex. Companies like Tektronix (high-speed diagnostic equipment), Perkin-Elmer (computers and instruments for quality control), Finnigan MAT (computers useful for monitoring uranium enrichment), and the U.S. subsidiary of Siemens (instruments for analyzing powders useful for A-bomb and missile manufacture) had sales recorded in government export logs.
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Source: Wall Street Journal
I think it would be interesting to know what Hussein would do with, I quote, "instruments for analyzing powders useful for A-bomb and missile manufacture". Probably nuclear powerplants, coz the US government would never allow Hussein to use such tools for a doubtfull,... well... use? right?