March 16, 2018
The Supreme Leader has told a gathering of teens and young adults just how terrible Westerners are.
The youths were from Tehran and Alborz Provinces and were planning to go on a “Travelers to the Light” program, which is a bus trip to several battlefields of the Iran-Iraq War intended to instill in young people the ideals of the war.
Khamenehi met with them Saturday and told them: “Today’s claimants [to world power status] conspicuously provided bomb-making chemicals to Saddam. The US and the powerful part of Europe—including the UK, France, Italy and Germany—all backed Saddam and helped him as much as they could.”
Actually, the positions of countries varied widely, with only France, of those cited by Khamenehi, strongly in Saddam Hussein’s corner.
Khamenehi told his audience, “At the beginning of the war, Saddam’s army had limited equipment, [but] as the time passed and despite the war, their amount of equipment increased substantially.”
He said, “The Soviet Union, though opposed to the US, joined the US in this event because the USSR owned numerous Muslim Republics, and the Islamic Revolution could incite those republics to think of their own Islamic identity.” Actually, the Soviet Union strongly supported Iraq long before the revolution in Iran and continued to support it during the war.
He said: “The US, USSR, NATO and all other domineering powers backed Saddam to destroy the Islamic Republic.” But none of them did that. Many countries sold Saddam weapons for the money. In fact, many sold to both sides. Few outside the Iranian establishment saw the war as some great ideological conflict, despite the Islamic Republic’s effort to paint it that way.
“France provided its most advanced jets and helicopters to Saddam. Germany provided poisonous chemicals to Saddam to be used during the war,” Khamenehi said. That was true of France. But it is a false portrait of Germany. Many German companies—not the German government—sold equipment to make chemical weapons to Saddam. In fact, international inspectors in the 1990s found that about 75 percent of the equipment used in Iraqi chemical warfare plants was German in origin. The German government never bothered to do much to enforce its export controls until it was embarrassed by that expose.
Khamenehi pointed to what he called the hypocrisy of certain groups who accuse others of chemical weapons’ use while they gave Saddam weapons to use against innocent people and Iranians. That was a slightly veiled attack on the United States, which had complained days earlier about Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad using chemicals in the ongoing battle of East Ghouta. “Those who criticize certain groups with the excuse of using chemicals today, at that time, publicly gave chemicals to Saddam for making his bombs,” he said.
But the United States government neither publicly nor secretly ever gave Saddam any chemicals. However, American investigators did uncover one firm in Baltimore that sold a chemical, used in both weapons and ballpoint pen ink, to Iraq. That firm sold the same chemical to Iran, making a profit off both sides in the war. The firm was prosecuted for violating US export laws and was put out of business.
Khamenehi insisted, “All satanic regimes of the world helped the arrogant Satan, Saddam, to create this war and to help him win the war…. Of course, all their efforts were futile, and they couldn’t take even the smallest part of the Islamic Republic under their control.” Presumably, most of his listeners already knew that Iraq had managed to seize a number of small parcels of Iranian territory along the border.
He said, “The animosity of the domineering powers for the Islamic Republic led to this war, and the magnificence and self-sacrifice of our youth put an end to the war, in our interest, making the Islamic Republic stronger; this is the identity of the holy defense, which we have to safeguard.” The regime has always insisted that Iran “won” the war, though at best it ended in a stalemate. Khamenehi did not mention that the Islamic Republic fought most of the war with the publicly stated goal of toppling Saddam.
Khamenehi stated: “The fact that, every year, millions of people go on the “Travelers to the Light” journey is one of the manifestations of safeguarding that magnificent era.”
He then turned to what he termed the intentions of Iran’s enemies. “The enemies hope that when the turn of your generation—18 to 25 year-olds—arrives, and your generation reigns over the country, Islam and the revolution will be no longer, and the Americans will be dominant over all aspects of the country.
“With this purpose, they started the fighting against the Islamic Republic and caused the war, and they’ve continued their soft and hard attacks since the war,” he said.
He continued, “When the revolution took place, its greatness frightened powerful enemies. On the other hand, when they saw this revolution was welcomed among other Muslim nations and in countries headed by those dependant on the US, and that the people of the world started shouting slogans in favor of the Islamic revolution, the enemies aimed at destroying this revolution at any price.”