posted April 20, 2003 01:12 PM            

One of the "Anti-War" (Anti-Bush) arguments we keep hearing from the Left Coast and the People's Republic of San Francisco is that the United States armed Iraq in the first place.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute gathered arms sales information to Iraq from 1973 through 2002. Also the Weekly Standard carried the story. It seems that the top 3 sellers were also members of the UN Security Council (the Peace at all costs faction of the club):

USSR 57%
France 13%
China 12%
USA 1%

Thus 70% of arms sales to Iraq were by USSR and France alone!

For the simple minded, however, it might be difficult for them to make distinctions as subtle
as between say 13% and 1%, or even 57% and 1%

Virtually all of the help we gave Iraq was intelligence information and this was during the Iran-Iraq war. At the time, Iran as a much greater threat to the US than Iraq. It was Iran that was backing Hezbollah, (The group responsible for grabbing Amercian hostages as well as other terrorist activities)