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January 26, 2006
Oh, THOSE weapons of mass destruction
At some point the Bush administration abandoned (at least publicly) the possibility Saddam Hussein had WMD that were smuggled out of the country before the US invaded. Last month the President said:
After the swift fall of Baghdad, we found mass graves filled by a dictator; we found some capacity to restart programs to produce weapons of mass destruction, but we did not find those weapons.
It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong.
I've never understood why the WMD dialogue blithely assumes that if WMD weren't found, Saddam didn't have them, and I've been disappointed the WH seems unwilling to acknowledge that an unintended consequence of disarming Saddam may have been arming Syria et al. That position seems more credible than a wholesale "we were wrong." But it raises questions about the conduct of the war, and to me its abandonment reeks of crass political calculations. Anyway, with this in mind I was pleased to see the NY Sun is pursuing the smuggled WMD story, previewing "Saddam's Secrets," a book by the No. 2 man in Saddam's Air Force, Georges Sada. The Sun reports:
Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed...two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats...Then Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including "yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel." The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.
Posted by bill at January 26, 2006 08:59 AM
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