Apr 08 2008

Were Saddam’s WMD moved to Syria?

Posted by Neocon in 9/11 Conspiracies, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Syria

In the same way that the administration is willfully ignoring to publicly confront the drastic and violent role that Iran is playing in Iraq right now, they have been unwilling to even pursue further exploration into the subject of Saddam’s WMD programs. The current debate over Iraq has moved on (largely, unless you’re a street protester) beyond the rationale for war, and perhaps that is what Bush wants, but I don’t see why there hasn’t been a larger effort to find out what really happened before we went in.

The same can be said for the North Korean nuclear program. We’re in the middle of another period of quasi-diplomacy with the North, a despotic regime that has no intent of disarming itself. After abandoning the hard-line stance of the first term, the administration seems content to leave the Kims in power to develop (and test!) nuclear weapons. It’s mind-boggling.

So given the total retreat from the ‘with us or against us’ mentality that so many of us warmongering internet hawks adore, don’t expect much more to come out of this story. Bush has completely given up on the fight to frame Iraq in its proper context.

An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, Channel 2 stated Monday.

Furthermore, according to a report leaked to the TV channel, Syria has arrested 10 intelligence officials following the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh.

Background on the September 6th strike can be found here and here. The interim report on Iraq WMD stated that many of the sites visited during the search had been cleaned out. Documents burned, files removed, etc… yet Washington STILL hasn’t bothered to finish translating all the documents that we were able to capture!

Some caution and analysis from Hot Air. Allah doesn’t see how this fits in with the rest of the September 6th attack narrative. It really doesn’t at this point.

Good Lt. at Jawa Report is taking a “wait and see” approach.

Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs is waiting for official acknowledgment and linking to Caroline Glick’s great piece questioning why Bush is so content to keep his mouth shut.

If nothing else, this story shows that there is still a lot of interest in WMDs on the web. Not just from people who hinged their support for the Iraq war on WMDs and still want to be proven right, but from bloggers and readers who understand that not nailing down all the loose ends in Iraq’s Intelligence Services and their weapons production could come back to bite us in a big way.

Allah wonders if this isn’t the right-wing equivalent of the truthers. Not even close. There is no evidence that any government official ever plotted to attack the World Trade Center or the Pentagon, nor that we have a pattern of self-attack. Saddam had an extensive and provable historical WMD capability and a willingness to use those weapons.

The motivations are also very different. Truthers seek to shove something in the rest of the country’s face and gain attention for themselves. They enjoy playing patriot. As I said before, the people who still have an interest in the WMD mystery are just trying to figure out what the hell happened to a lot of stuff that could boil your skin off. It isn’t about grandstanding. There are very few minds that would be changed by the revelation that Saddam did indeed have the banned weapon stockpiles we thought he did.

That we’re still digging up decades old caches of WMD shells from the Iraqi desert (the ones Saddam declared he had destroyed) doesn’t bode well for the mystery being resolved any time soon, even without a conspiracy to spirit the weapons away to neighboring countries.

Update: JustOneMinute is looking at the WMD reports too. (It’s the Duelfer report)