Study: Britain did not gas Iraqis in 1920s

HAMILTON, N.Y., Oct. 22 (UPI) -- British forces did not use chemical weapons on Iraqis just after World War I, despite claims they did, a U.S. historian says.

"The symmetrical appeal of history faithfully repeating itself (in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq) no doubt accounts for much of the public and scholarly credence accorded to claims that the British used chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq," Colgate University history Professor R.M. Douglas writes in The Journal of Modern History, a U.S. publication studying European intellectual, political, and cultural history.

But such claims are inconsistent with the facts and implausible, Douglas says.

After the 2003 U.S. invasion, allegations of chemical bombings by the British erupted into the public sphere, Douglas recounts.

The allegations from scholars and critics suggested Iraq's history of chemical weapons did not start with President Saddam Hussein's gas attack on Kurds. Rather, it was Britain that first used chemical weapons, when it controlled the region under a League of Nations mandate in the 1920s, to quell Arab uprisings, the scholars argued.

Some went so far as to tie Arab distrust of the West to Britain's alleged brutal chemical attacks, Douglas says.

But Douglas finds these often-repeated claims, stemming from a 1921 letter written by British Air Ministry official J.A. Webster, to be false.

Britain's army had asked for permission to use gas shells in 1921, but did not use them, Douglas says.

Yet Webster's claim became the basis for allegations of British chemical use, with the story mutating and spreading, Douglas says.

The British and Iraqi governments had no immediate comment on the research.