On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Daniel Roethlisberger wrote:
19% by value were from France; 57% from the Soviet Union (ie Russia), East Germany, and Czechoslovakia; 8% from China. [...] It is not coincidental that the Security Council members opposed to taking any action on Iraq's repeated violations were France, Russia, Germany, and China: Iraq's weapons suppliers.
You are confusing todays Germany with the communist pre-1989 Eastern Germany,
I am not confusing them at all. There is ample evidence that the Germans sold to Saddam both before and after the reunification of Germany.
two *very* different things (I thought the British had better knowledge of the "Olde Europe" than the fellow Americans do?)
As to the rest, always look at who published the "facts". It's the same sources that claimed the Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It's
The _UN_ claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They ordered them destroyed, and actually watched some being destroyed until Saddam threw them out in the late 1990s. They subsequently reported that they could not account for tons of chemical weapons; this was one of the reasons for the second war.
unfortunate that most people fall for this kind of manipulative misinformation.
The manipulative misinformation is the claim that the US somehow armed Saddam Hussein. He had French planes, Czech weapons, Russian tanks; we saw them burning on TV in both wars. There is no evidence at all that the US supplied weapons in any quantity to Iraq, just unsubstantiated claims from the usual mob, the ones who supposedly know all those secrets hidden from the rest of us. -- Jim Dixon jdd@dixons.org tel +44 117 982 0786 mobile +44 797 373 7881 http://jxcl.sourceforge.net Java unit test coverage http://xlattice.sourceforge.net p2p communications infrastructure