"United by a common interest, Iraq and the United States restored diplomatic relations in 1984, and the United States began to actively assist Iraq in ending the fighting. It mounted Operation Staunch, an attempt to stem the flow of arms to Iran. It also increased its purchases of Iraqi oil while cutting back on Iranian oil purchases, and it urged its allies to do likewise. All this had the effect of repairing relations between the two countries, which had been at a very low ebb."

www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/04-07-98.html 

a) Chemical ordnances 

Iraq had turned to chemical warfare in the last part of the Iraq-Iran war when the Iraqis were on the brink of being submerged by human waves of Iranian fighters, often teen-agers. The Reagan Administration turned a blind eye on, and winked at the Iraqi actions as the U.S. covertly supported the Iraqi regime in its endeavor to defeat the Iranians, fearing that the Ayatollahs (Khomeini & co.) would export their fundamentalist revolution to the entire Arabian Gulf Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, etc.). Iranians reciprocated, though to a lesser extent, until, exhausted, the two sides reached a cease-fire. 

After the invasion of Kuwait, in August 1990, the Bush Administration began asserting that the Iraqi regime had gassed its own people in Northern Iraq (the Kurds). The administration was specifically pointing its finger to the Halabjah deadly gas attack in March 1988 (Halabjah is a Kurdish town in Northern Iraq), after the cease-fire had taken place. The event took place. Halabjah was gassed. What is not clear is which side did it. At the time, the Reagan administration suggested that the Iranians were the culprits. Upon careful consideration, analysts have come to the conclusion that the Iraqis were responsible for the attack. The town had been taken over by Iranian elite forces and it would have made little sense for their government to gas its own troops while, in all likelihood, the Iraqis had reasons to proceed with such a dire attack. The town, as said, had been taken over by the Iranians and some Kurd factions had allied themselves with Iran. The fact remains that to this day, there is no definite evidence of who did what. While logic might point into the Iraqi direction (see the analysis of Glen Rangwala on the CASI forum, at http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2002/msg00034.html) doubts linger. For example, Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes that "Iranians also used poison gas at Halabjah and may have caused some of the casualties" (The Military Threat from Iraq, page 36). See also the March 2002 opinion of Anthony Arnove on Zmag, "Convenient And Not So Convenient Massacres," at http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-03/28arnove.cfm to get an idea of the selective use of these events by the US government. 
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/ga138.html

US Army War College (USAWC) undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by Iran and Iraq in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare. They concluded that it was Iran and not Iraq that killed the Kurds.
US Suppressed Gas Charge Report
by Raju Thomas



"The repeated American propaganda weapon to rationalise the deaths of more than one million innocent Iraqis since 1991 through economic sanctions is that Saddam Hussein used poison gas against Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war and against Iraq’s own Kurdish citizens. The accusation is now being invoked to launch a full-scale American assault on Iraq. This claim of Iraq gassing its own citizens at Halabjah is suspect. First, both Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons against each other during their war. Second, at the termination of the Iran-Iraq war, professors Stephen Pelletiere and Leif Rosenberger, and Lt Colonel Douglas Johnson of the US Army War College (USAWC) undertook a study of the use of chemical weapons by Iran and Iraq in order to better understand battlefield chemical warfare. They concluded that it was Iran and not Iraq that killed the Kurds." 

"Regarding the Halabjah incident where Iraqi soldiers were reported to have gassed their own Kurdish citizens, the USAWC investigators observed: “It appears that in seeking to punish Iraq, Congress was influenced by another incident that occurred five months earlier in another Iraq-Kurdish city, Halabjah. In March 1988, the Kurds at Halabjah were bombarded with chemical weapons, producing many deaths. Photographs of the Kurdish victims were widely disseminated in the international media. Iraq was blamed for the Halabjah attack even though it was subsequently brought out that Iran too had used chemical weapons in this operation, and it seemed likely that it was the Iranian bombardment that had actually killed the Kurds.” [The Iranians thought the Kurds had fled Halabjah and that they were attacking occupying Iraqi forces. But the Iraqis had already vacated Halabjah and the Kurds had returned. Iran gassed the Kurds by accident]"

"In March 1991 as the massive US-led attack on Iraq ended, I was visiting the USAWC to give a lecture on South Asian security and discussed this problem with professor Pelletiere at lunch. I recall Pelletiere telling me that the USAWC investigation showed that in the Iranian mass human wave battlefield strategy, Teheran used non-persistent poison gas against Iraqi soldiers so as to be able to attack and advance into the areas vacated by Iraqis. On the other hand, Baghdad used persistent gas to halt the Iranian human wave attacks. There was a certain consistency to this pattern. However, in the Halabjah incident, the USAWC investigators discovered that the gas used that killed hundreds of Kurds was the non-persistent gas, the chemical weapon of choice of the Iranians. Note it was the Iranians who arrived at the scene first, who reported the incident to UN observers, and who took pictures of the gassed Kurdish civilians."

"I asked professor Pelletiere in March 1991, when he thought their findings would come out. I recall him telling me that it would probably take about five years after emotions over the Gulf war crisis died down. However, the USAWC report of 1990 has been dispatched into oblivion. The propaganda that Iraq gassed its own Kurdish civilians is cons-tantly invoked by the media. It was reactivated by president Clinton in December 1998 to justify the further bombing and destruction of Iraq."



 The author is the Allis Chalmers distinguished professor of International Affairs at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/THO209A.html

http://members.fortunecity.com/britonsvbush/articles/raju.html


From another American government report:

: "Blood agents [i.e., cyanogen chloride] were allegedly
: responsible for the most infamous use of chemicals in
: the war--the killing of Kurds at Halabjah. Since the
: Iraqis have no history of using these two agents--and
: the Iranians do--we conclude that the Iranians
: perpetrated this attack."

http://www.ncia.net/wildman/messageboard/messages/84.html

The New York Times reported on corporate America's war
: project SHAD, where during the Vietnam war, 4000 U.S.
: sailors were gassed deliberately by Republicans with
: gruesome biological toxins, including sarin.
http://www.ncia.net/wildman/messageboard/messages/84.html