Others Guilty With Chemical Ali

Saddam Hussein's cousin, the man nick-named 'Chemical Ali', has been handed another death penalty (the 3rd) after being convicted of ordering the infamous 1988 gas attack in the Kurdish village of Halabja that killed an estimated 5,000 people.
He is never going to get much compassion from anyone but the question hanging heavily in the air is the question of Americas guilt in supplying the weapons in the atrocity.
While Ronald Reagan and his administration must accept a major role in events, chief perpetrators are Saddam who ordered the attack and Ali Hassan al-Majeed who carried it out.
Other major players are those who supplied the chemicals, the know how and the means of delivery to Saddam and America are not the major contributor in this category.
The major chemical exporters to Saddam's Iraq were Singapore (4,515 tons), the Netherlands (4,261 tons), Egypt (2,400 tons), India (2,343 tons), West Germany (1,027 tons), Luxembourg (650 tons) and Brazil (100 tons).
The major exporters of the equipment to make the chemicals came from Germany (163), France (85), Austria (54) and Spain (14) while the shells and rockets to carry the chemicals were mostly Italian (75,000 shells/rockets) Spain (57,500 shells/rockets), China (45,000 shells/rockets) and Egypt (28,500 shells/rockets).
While the gassing of Kurds in Halabja featured heavily in the Bush and Blair Iraq pre-War build-up of vilifying Saddam, the U.S. State Department previously took the official position that Iran was responsible and not Iraq who they were backing.
The Defense Intelligence Ageny (DIA) study at the time reported that it was Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment (page 100) which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990s until Saddam's sent his troops into Kuwait.
The CIA claimed that: 'Blood agents were allegedly responsible for the most infamous use of chemicals in the war—the killing of Kurds at Halabjah. Since the Iraqis have no history of using these two agents-and the Iranians do-we conclude that the Iranians perpetrated this attack'.
While America was sending billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other credits to Iraq, the British Government saw it as an opportunity to replenish Saddam's arsenal. One of the revelations to come out of the Scott inquiry into the arms-to-Iraq affair was the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after he shelled Halabja.
It took seven weeks of haggling until the UN Security Council censured the Halabja attack. Even then, its choice of neutral language (condemning the 'continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict between Iran and Iraq,' and calling on "both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons") was hardly the stinging rebuke expected.

As i said initially, the ultimate blame falls on Saddam and Ali Hassan al-Majeed but there are many other countries that deserve to hang their heads over the incident. Many supplied him, some lied about it, most turned a blind eye but almost all were seemingly relaxed about it at the time.