By Eric Margolis
".......In 1980, when these efforts failed to overthrow the Islamic regime, the US, Britain and their Arab oil clients got another US `gendarme,’ – Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – to invade Iran.
The resulting bloody, eight year Iran-Iraq war cost Iran one million casualties, half of them dead. Iran suffered more dead in this war than the US did in World War II. So violent and desperate was the World War I-style trench fighting that 12-year old Iranian boys and old men went forward to clear Iraqi minefields with their bodies.
The US, Britain, and the oil Arabs financed and helped arm Iraq. Israel sold Iran a reported $5 billion in US arms and spare parts. Europe supplied Iraq with chemical weapons, food and arms.
After the US Navy entered the war on Iraq’s side, Iran was forced to sue for peace. Iran lay in financial and emotional ruins, with an entire generation killed in battle or horribly maimed by Iraq’s western-supplied chemical weapons that included the burning agents mustard gas and Lewisite, chlorine, cyanide, and a variety of modern nerve gases.
Rightly or wrongly, most Iranians blame the West for their historical suffering. They see the Western powers and Israel continuing efforts to overthrow their government, isolate Iran, and seize its oil. Or even launch a long-awaited air blitz against Iran’s so-far civilian nuclear program.
A former commander in the Iran-Iraq War, Mohammed Ahmadinejad, who led many dangerous missions behind Iraqi lines, is today the president of Iran......."
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