saddam

The Baath party regime of 1968 was also immediately welcomed by Britain: ‘The new regime may look to the United Kingdom for military training and equipment and we should lose no time in appointing a defence attache’, the ambassador in Baghdad wrote. The regime’s new Defence Minister, General Tikriti, was invited to the Farnborough Air Show and was told by the ambassador that ‘it seemed to me we now had an opportunity to restore Anglo/Iraqi relations to something of their former intimacy’. In reply, ‘General Tikriti said that during the Ba’athist regime of 1963 he had greatly appreciated the cooperative attitude of HMG’.

The first recorded use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war was in 1982, two years into the conflict. Both sides used them, but Saddam was the first, in response to Iran’s vast manpower that had begun to turn the tide on Iraq’s initial advances.

On more than one occasion, seasoned British foreign correspondents – very much the minority in the press corps - informed the British and American embassies in Baghdad of Saddam’s use of chemical weapons... British and American diplomats refused to act on anything other than material evidence. They never sought such proof themselves, and knew full well that it was near impossible for we reporters to secure it.

Barely one month after [Halabja] in 1988, Tony Newton, Margaret Thatcher's Trade Secretary, flew to Baghdad to offer Saddam £340 million of taxpayers' money in export credits. Three months later, the smiling Newton was back, this time to celebrate with Saddam the joyous news that Iraq was now Britain's third-largest market for machine tools, from which a range of Iraqi weapons was forged - some of them used against British troops in the Gulf War.