Douglas Maughan (Letters, March 14) accuses Nigel Dewar Gibb and myself of pretending "that Iraq was a land of peace and plenty pre-invasion".
This, he says, "is simply nonsense". What is nonsense is the claim that either Mr Dewar Gibb's, or my letters on Saddam's Iraq made any such claims.
Mr Maughan cites the 1988 al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq, which included the town of Halabja, as part of the hell under which Iraqis lived through. March 16 was the 25th anniversary of that massacre.
That the massacre of the innocent citizens of Halabja was possible was thanks in no small part to the British and US governments, which secretly supplied their friend Saddam Hussein with the military and non-military exports to carry out this atrocity.
Later the public inquiry of Lord Justice Scott into the Arms for Iraq affair concluded that the British Government's secret policy of exporting military and non-military supplies to Saddam increased markedly after the Halabja genocide.
How was this known? Because in the Scott Report it was stated that Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe had written that the ceasefire ending the Iraq-Iran war could mean "major opportunities for British industry". An official working for Sir Geoffrey, quoted in the Scott Report, stated that he wanted this export-drive initiative kept quiet as "it could look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".
No-one in their right mind would condone the actions of the tyrant Saddam Hussein or of the many other despots that successive UK governments supported, and continue to support, when it suits their selfish agenda.
Tom Minogue,
94 Victoria Terrace,
Dunfermline.
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