I have the assumption at that time and I think that maybe true is it just rather than so much punishing the Kurds I think Halabcha really showed Saddam’s total disregard for human life and decency.  I think he just clustered the place and we actually in radio-free Iraq men had fled but interviewed the Brigadier General who is in charge of the air force operations when they received the order to hit Halabcha with all available means, a code for using chemical weapons.  It was pretty obvious what happened in Halabcha.  There was an allegation at that time and I just participated in their conference with Brown, lot dwelt on this subject.  It was some confusing allegations at that time that maybe the Iranians have used chemical weapons.  I don’t think there is any evidence for that.  And there’s not even- I’m not convinced evidence the Iranians ever actually use chemical weapons in the war, but if they did- I mean they were way behind the Iraqis in the use to the- use of the Iraqis was much greater.  As far as Anfal was concerned, that was even more difficult and, you know, now the name Anfal means a lot.  At that time, it was just another name because all of these campaigns had names.

What had happened or continue to happen was that responsibility for the north of the Kurds had been taken over by Comical Ali, Ali Hassan al-Majid who was- if anyone who was more brutal than Saddam, it was Ali Hassan and that we could tell that whole villages were being depopulated and the people were being shift offs somewhere but by the time I left, we didn’t have any evidence of wholesale killings, although it was reasonable to suspect there were at least some killings but the real information about Anfal I think came out after I left but at that time, we were trying very hard to get information, we needed permission to travel up there and under normal circumstance we could travel but I was- it was impossible at that point to get up around Halabcha into the Kurdish areas.  But everybody knew that Saddam was an extremely brutal man and that if anybody opposed him he would eliminate them without any thought at all.  The issue we discussed that Brown was an interesting one is that is why didn’t the US protest more strongly the use of chemical weapons which is a reasonable question.

All I can say is we tried at least in Bagdad to raise the issue whenever we could without any expectation that the Iraqis would respond.  We did not post it as a moral issue that would have been a total waste of time, we have post it as a strategic issue because it actually had significance for the cold war, the defense of Western Europe if the bar was lowered for the use of chemical warfare that raised the risks that the soviets would use it in an attack on Western Europe and we were very convinced about that.  What we did try to do with some success, we were part of an informal group known as the Australia Group which tried to cut off the precursors for the chemical weapons, the different chemicals, and all of these chemicals have legitimate uses but when you see how they’re being purchased, how they fit together then you understand that they are not being used for pharmaceuticals or fertilizers and so that they’re being used to kill people, and we did have some success in cutting off the chemical precursors but the Iraqis were very skillful at buying one item, you know, in Belgium and one in Denmark or one in Germany and a couple of times even manage to get them in the United States.  The real issue was whether we should have made this such a big issue to- that we should have stop our support, whatever support we were giving to the Iraqis and my personal view is, you know, I think the issue of preventing Iran from winning the war was the dominant issue and the- we felt the chemical issue but it was clear that we weren’t be able to influence the Iraqi [IB] and that anything we did to punish Iraq would only harm our own interest in the region.