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For all the dis­cus­sion that took place before, dur­ing and after the Per­sian Gulf War, com­par­a­tive­ly lit­tle atten­tion has been paid to the well-doc­u­ment­ed fact that West­ern nations, includ­ing and espe­cial­ly the Unit­ed States, had much to do with arm­ing Sadam Hus­sein. These seg­ments focus on the role of Kamel Hus­sein, Sadam’s son-in-law, in the acqui­si­tion of Iraq’s arse­nal. Kamel lat­er defect­ed to the West in late 1995—only to return to Iraq and be exe­cut­ed as a trai­tor some months lat­er. Kamel Hus­sein was the point man in obtain­ing much of Iraq’s weapon­ry from the Unit­ed States and Britain. The broad­cast draws on the land­mark work of Finan­cial Times of Lon­don cor­re­spon­dent Alan Fried­man’s book Spi­der’s Web:The Secret His­to­ry of how the White House Ille­gal­ly Armed Iraq (hard­cov­er, Ban­tam, 1993.) The seg­ments draw on Fried­man’s doc­u­men­ta­tion of Kamel Hus­sein’s work with var­i­ous ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence, in order to obtain weapon­ry nece­sary to arm of Iraq for its con­flict with Iran dur­ing the 1980’s. Par­tic­u­lar atten­tion is paid to the Amer­i­can role in assist­ing Kamel’s acqui­si­tion of tech­nol­o­gy essen­tial for Sadam’s nuclear, chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal and mis­sile deliv­ery sys­tems. (Record­ed in the fall of 1995.)