The world is getting sick from the
spreading COVID-19 virus. North Americans and Europeans are now as
horrified as Chinese by the invisible killer that has put their hospitals under
siege.
They are also getting a grim foretaste of what biological warfare would
be like. Those not
cowering in terror in their homes would likely be amazed to learn that some of their governments are still
churning out highly toxic chemical and biological agents in hidden
factories.
But surely our lily white democracies
don’t stoop to making poison gas and germs?
Back in 1990-91, I was based
in Baghdad covering the first of the Gulf Wars. The US was threatening to
attack Iraq for daring to invade oil-rich Kuwait, which used to be part of Iraq
until ‘detached’ by the British Empire. At the same time, the eight-year
Iran-Iraq War had just ended in a bloody stalemate. The US and Britain
had pressed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to invade Iran, seize its oil wealthy and
overthrow the Islamic government in Tehran.
Facing
a US-British invasion, Saddam Hussein ordered all foreigners in Iraq rounded up
and confined to tourist hotels. Among the foreigners, I discovered four
British scientific technicians who had been sent, or ‘seconded,’ to a
newly built biowarfare chemical complex south of Baghdad at Salman Pak.
They were then trucked to Baghdad as hostages against a US attack.
I
managed to slip into the compound that held them and talked for hours over mugs
of tea. The British tech team told me they had been secretly sent to Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq by Britain’s Ministry of Defense and Britain’s MI6 Secret
Intelligence Service to help Iraq’s military develop and deploy biological
weapons for use against numerically superior Iranian forces on the Central
Front, Al-Faw Peninsula, and again Kurdish rebels in the north.
The bio
weapons included Anthrax, botulism, Q fever and tularemia that attacks the
eyes, throat, skin and lymph nodes. Salman Pak also produced
quantities of nerve and mustard gasses used against Iranian infantry
formations.
Most
raw materials for the germ and gas came from Europe. Feeder stocks
for the germ/poison gas weapons came from the main UC chemical warfare plans at
Ft. Detrick, Maryland.
A popular joke among western
journalists in Baghdad went, ‘of course Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass
destruction. We have the delivery receipts.’
The times Iraq deployed its chemical/bio
weapons against Iran, the results were nightmarish: blinded soldiers
choking to death, unable to unable to breathe; soldiers with their skin peeling
off; dead mothers holding babies in their arms. Many of these attacks
were targeted by US satellites positioned over Iraq. US Air Force
officers worked closely with their military counterparts Iraq.
To this day, there remain tens of thousands
of maimed, blinded, crippled Iraqi soldiers. It was Iraq’s version of
World War I, cheerfully financed by the US, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Iraq’s once thriving economy is mostly in ruins. US and British bombing
even destroyed most of Iraq’s sewage systems, water reserves, hospitals and
bridges. Contaminated water alone killed 500,000 Iraqi children, according
to the UN, a price ‘worth paying’ said US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright.
The moral of this terrible
story, and the current worldwide epidemic, is to immediately ban all chemical
and biological weapons everywhere. Destroy all chem/bio warfare plants
everywhere, including the US, Russa, China, India and Israel.
The COVID-19 virus is merely a taste of
what a real biological war would be like. Many around the world who bear
us ill cannot help but take notice how the world’s richest, mightiest nation
can be brought to its knees by some invisible bugs.
When President Trump fulminates against
China over COVID-19, he should be advised that the anthrax and other germ
weapons used against Iraq in 1990 originated at Fort Detrick, just 50 miles NW
of the White House, a mere one hour drive if traffic is not too heavy.
Eric S.
Margolis [send him
mail] is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new
book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the
Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World. See his website.
Copyright © Eric Margolis
