Proponents of a war against Iraq, like malaysiakini's Transitions

blogger Oon Yeoh, urge people to deposit their full trust in a US government that says it will liberate the Iraqi people and make the country a better place.

They cite comments made by US officials like Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, as quoted by Oon Yeoh, proudly claims that "the US' record is not o­ne of imperialism. It is o­ne of doing the job, bringing the peace, restoring order and getting a responsible government in place.

"If it is necessary to have a conflict, it is all for the purpose of making Iraq a good neighbour that is not developing weapons, that is not threatening its neighbours ...so we are going into Iraq not to destroy the place, but to make it better," says Powell.

Besides the US record of "non-imperialism", they also frequently cite Saddam Hussein's record of using chemical weapons as o­ne of the reasons why the world should be rid of him.

Iraq's most extensive use of chemical weapons was during the Iran-Iraq war, most notably in the period from 1983 up to 1988, when a ceasefire was agreed to by the two countries. The most well-known use of such weapons by Iraq, however, was the poison gas attack o­n the Iraqi town of Halabja in 1988, which killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqi Kurds.

But just as Oon Yeoh says it would be "simple" for him to "demolish" the anti-war arguments of some of his detractors, it is as simple to question the blind trust that some proponents of war o­n Iraq place in claims such as those made by Colin Powell above.

A simple search o­n the Internet would easily bring up a list of equipment and material suppliers for Iraq's current chemical and biological weapons capabilities.

An even simpler look at the list would just as easily tell anyone who could read that the main exporters of those equipment and materials, the bulk of which were made in the 1980s, were American companies and organisations.

And they kept providing Iraq with those capabilities, with the full knowledge that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons o­n Iranian troops, which, by standards that the US now judges Iraq or any humane standard, was proof of his bloodthirsty nature.

(Never mind that the US, and much of the world, were also fully aware then of Saddam Hussein's "fondness" for killing his political opponents.)

In fact, right up till 1989 - after the murder of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja - US companies like American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) continued to provide Iraq with, among other things, dozens of pathogenic biological agents and several strains of anthrax.

These were biological, not chemical agents, but were ingredients for weapons of mass destruction nonetheless.

With Saddam Hussein already having demonstrated the extent of his cruelty then, o­ne wonders why such shipments were allowed to continue, or even initiated to begin with.

Those were the mistakes of the US government then, which, like the US government of today, was Republican - Ronald Reagan was president from 1981 to 1989, followed by George Bush up till 1993, with Dick Cheney as his secretary of defence.

Reagan's special Middle East envoy tasked with "normalising" Iraq-US relations was Donald Rumsfeld, who met Saddam Hussein several times for that purpose in 1983, which was during a time when the Washington Post said, citing declassified documents, Saddam "was using chemical weapons o­n an almost daily basis in defiance of international conventions".

Today, Dick Cheney is vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld is secretary of defence.

How do you trust a US government that says a war "is all for the purpose of making Iraq a good neighbour that is not developing weapons, that is not threatening its neighbours" when the most ardent proponents of a war in that government include people partly responsible for helping Iraq further refine its weapons of mass destruction at a time when the country had already showed its willingness to use them?

How do you trust people who, in their rush to war, have still not publicly admitted or apologised, at least to the long-suffering Iraqi people, for being involved in events that have had a direct hand in creating the monster that is Saddam Hussein today?

The US record is certainly not of imperialism. But neither has it entirely been a record of "bringing peace, restoring order and putting a responsible government in place".

For what peace did the US bring, what order did it restore, and what government did it help prop up in Iraq in the 1980s?