Another quick note - Blatham, no, those 2 were not Canadians either; hockey stick exports picked up subsequently, though C$ didn't follow. No matter - any country who produced player #99 is a great country, period!
Timber is right, btw: we
never supplied arms to Iraq during 1980-1988; assorted Latin Americans and Middle Easterners (mostly Israel-based, with strong Turkish trans-shipment support) may have done so, as per declassified cable traffic:
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Document 34: Department of State Cable from Kenneth W. Dam to United States Embassy in Jordan. "Rumsfeld Mission: Meeting with King Hussein in London," December 23, 1983.
Ambassador-at-large and presidential emissary Donald Rumsfeld discusses prospects for improving U.S.-Iraqi relations with King Hussein of Jordan. Rumsfeld reports on his talks with Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz and says they had "more areas of agreement than disagreement." He also reviews the status of a proposed pipeline to Aqaba for Iraq's oil.
The U.S. promoted the Aqaba pipeline project strenuously for several years during the early to mid 1980s. It would have carried oil from northern Iraq to the Gulf of Aqaba in Jordan, alleviating the disruptive effect on Iraq's oil output that resulted from Iran's attacks on oil transshipment facilities in the Persian Gulf and from Syria's closing of a pipeline that had transported Iraqi oil. The proposed project reflected the U.S.'s extreme nervousness about threats to the world oil supply resulting from the Iran-Iraq war.
The U.S. involved several U.S.-based multinational corporations in planning the project. International financier Bruce Rappaport, a friend of CIA director William Casey, was also a central figure in the proposed deal. (The final report of the independent counsel for the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" scandal cites reports indicating that Rappaport's bank in Geneva was the recipient of a mysterious $10 million payment from the Sultan of Brunei to fund the Nicaraguan contras that subsequently disappeared. Rappaport denied this; the final report says that the issue remained unresolved. He was invited to testify in 1999 at a House Banking committee hearing on corruption in Russian financial transactions, but declined.) The project was complicated by demands that the U.S. arrange for ironclad security guarantees from the Israelis, since the pipeline would have been vulnerable to their attack. The Israelis, for their part, demanded guarantees that pipeline facilities would not cause environmental damage.
All involved had their reasons for at least hypothetical interest in the project. For Iraq, it would have been a manifestation of improved U.S.-Iraq relations - they wanted as much U.S. financial and other involvement in the proposed deal as possible. For the U.S., it would have provided an alternative, theoretically secure outlet for oil and created a nexus for entangling Iraqi interests with those of Jordan and Israel, consistent with U.S. plans to create a wider consortium of Arab countries that would cooperate with the U.S. and would be willing to resolve the Palestine-Israel dispute on U.S. terms. Israel would have benefited from new oil facilities in its vicinity, and won points with the Reagan administration. Also, according to internal documents from a friend of Reagan administration Attorney General Edmund Meese, brought in as an intermediary because of his Israeli ties, payoffs would have been skimmed from complex financial guarantee arrangements for the Israeli government and Labor Party.
Attempts to agree on arrangements that would satisfy all parties dragged on, until the several private companies that had been brought in to plan the project backed out, questioning the motives of all involved. Iraq, however, revived the concept in 2000, presumably for its own strategic interests.
Source: Court exhibit
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/index.htm
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P.S. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose <G>