Memory Lane: When US supported the use of chemical weapons by Saddam

"At the time, Saddam was a tacit ally of the West, fighting a gruesomely bloody conflict against neighboring Iran, in an earlier version of the lethal Sunni-Shiite split which has now made Syria its central battleground. Saddam initially denied responsibility for Halabja, although it later emerged that his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid—or, as his enemies knew him, "Chemical Ali"—had carried it out, just as he had many other chemical attacks in the war from 1980 to 1988, in which as many as a million Iranians and Iraqis died. The reaction of the Reagan Administration, which had been providing Saddam's military with information of the Iranian troop concentrations from AWACS surveillance in order to assist his missile-targeting against them, was initially to side with Saddam by suggesting that Iran had also used chemical weapons in the fighting. It was a shameful attempt at disinformation."