Twenty years on, the international community’s complicity of silence and inaction in bringing to account those countries, companies, and industrialists responsible for supplying and supporting Saddam Hussein’s chemical warfare initiative in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 does not bode well for (a) the credibility of the international community in making any case against supposed “rogue” states that may be contemplating deploying non-conventional weapons in their arsenals; effectively allowing those states to legitimately justify such arsenals as necessary defensive weapons in the face of a partial world with selective enforcement standards, and for (b) general global security, because to the extent that a standard, impartial, and universal enforcement policy is not adhered to and respected, a calculated and sinister policy of dehumanization (such as that most recently observed in a newspaper depicting Iranians as cockroaches streaming out of Iran, depicted as a sewer) may lead certain segments of civilization to feel that it is not only warranted to turn one’s head the other way if non-conventional weapons are used against other parts of civilization, but that it is indeed commendable to use such non-conventional weapons.
This dual standard, regretably, has historic precedence with the world keeping mum when in the 1920’s the Soviet Red Army resorted to chemical weapons to quash mass civil uprisings against the communist takeover of Russia; when in the 1930’s Mussolini’s Fascists used chemical weapons to gas Ethiopians in their campaign to occupy that country; and again in the 1980’s when it was alleged that the Soviet Red Army used chemical weapons in the fight against the Afghan Mujahideen.
