Talk:Iran-Iraq War/Related Articles

Not sure the talk should go here or under Iran-Iraq War proper

Thanks to Eric Gearhart about setting up the related articles. While at The Other Place, I tried to clean up a number of substantive articles, but, to put it mildly, there were some extremely partisan participants and I eventually gave up. I will copy this under the main Iran-Iraq war article. For those who haven't noticed, I have a solid first draft of Gulf War.

Still, both in my userspace there and to some extent mainspace, I did write a fair bit, with substantial sourcing, about foreign support to both Iran and Iraq. In a number of these cases, there may have been no formal national policy of support, and there was considerable clandestine procurement of embargoed equipment.

The U.S. and Soviet Union, however, both had their own interests. I was able to bring over the Soviet material, but, assuming it's useful, I may need to start the U.S. material almost from the start. Certain people had a very strong agenda of establishing the U.S. was behind every bad thing that happened to Iran, and didn't want to hear that Saddam might have had a bit to do with it.

There were also American politicians doing very silly things, such as posturing about dual-use substances being shipped, apparently without having anyone technically qualified taking a look at the list. For example, one of the lists of microbial cultures going to Iraq was a species that indeed is very potent -- if you are brewing fine Belgian ale. Unfortunately, there is a widespread misapprehension that getting organisms for a biological warfare program is the critical part, as nuclear materials are for a nuclear program. The critical equipment is the sort of fermenting gear, and other industrial equipment, that you'd use to start a microbrewery or make antibiotics. It was pretty well established, by the UN, that Iraq got these things from France and Russia. The utterly critical know-how is yet another area. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:25, 9 July 2008 (CDT)