08/27/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-10093

SADDAM'S CHEMICAL TERROR

The Iraqi people need to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein -- for many reasons. "There should be no doubt in anybody's mind," said President George W. Bush, that the Iraqi dictator "is thumbing his nose at the world, that he has gassed his own people, that he is trouble in his neighborhood, that he desires weapons of mass destruction."

Saddam Hussein has a long record of using weapons of mass destruction. He ordered the use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988. That conflict left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Iranians dead. Iraqi officials boasted that their chemical weapons would destroy Iranian forces. "We have a certain insecticide for every insect," said Iraq's propaganda radio, Voice of the Masses.

In February 1987, Saddam Hussein ordered his cousin, Ali Hasan al-Majid, to suppress a Kurdish revolt. Ali Hasan al-Majid was known as "Chemical Ali." His forces killed thousands of men, women, and children with mustard gas, cyanide, and sarin, a deadly nerve gas. Hardest hit was the city of Halabja. "Many people were collapsing around us and dying," a survivor recalls. More than five-thousand people died in agonizing convulsions. Some tens of thousands of others were injured.

Iraq's chemical weapons facilities were extensively damaged by air attacks from U.S.-led coalition military forces during the 1991 Gulf War to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Despite monitoring by the United Nations, Iraq has rebuilt facilities that are perfectly suited to support the production of deadly nerve gas, and there is little doubt that Iraq still has the means of delivering it.

During the 1980s, Iraq developed the most advanced biological weapons program in the Middle East. It includes weaponized anthrax, botulinum, and other deadly germs and toxins. Coalition air strikes destroyed many of these facilities, but stockpiles of biological weapons may still exist. Most threateningly of all, Iraq also seeks to acquire nuclear weapons.

Saddam Hussein has proven that there is no weapon he will not use; no atrocity that he will not order to maintain his repressive rule. As President Bush said, "we cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systematically break them. . . . In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action."