Saturday - September 17, 2011

What WMDs?

If we had delayed even a couple of months, until Saddam actually had his deadly pathogens and gas weapons, it would have meant the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers. And if those weapons had found their way into terrorist hands, it would have doomed millions. But did Saddam have these kinds of connections? Was he a global terror threat akin to al-Qaeda? The common wisdom says no. The common wisdom is wrong.

When American tanks smashed into Baghdad, Saddam had already completed construction of an anthrax production facility, which was a week away from going live. If it had been permitted to go into production, this one facility could have produced ten tons of weaponized anthrax a year.

Dual-use, mobile bio labs, hundreds of suicide bombers in training, direct links to dozens of terrorist groups throughout the Middle East and major funding to them, operatives kitted up and ready to attack in a dozen countries, half a thousand tons of yellowcake, a 40 fold increase in WMD spending ... the list goes on and on. Saddam Hussein was on the very, very cusp of the vertical part of the logarithmic curve of WMD growth when the USA invaded in March 2003. Another month’s delay would have given him enough poison to kill tens of thousands of our soldiers. Another year and he could have wiped out half the world. That was why we were “rushing to war” Senator Kennedy.

According to documents discovered after the war, by 1997 the number of university “instructors” doing solely WMD work numbered 3,300, with another 700 to 800 dispatched to WMD-related facilities to help with technical problems. Between 1996 and 2002 — the eve of the invasion — spending on WMD projects increased 40-fold, and the number of specific projects increased from 40 to 3,200. Top officials captured after the collapse of the regime repeatedly told investigators that Saddam’s WMD projects were in overdrive and ready to go into production the moment sanctions were lifted.

You mean those horrible sanctions that the evil USA was using to starve poor but happy kite flying Iraqi children? The sanctions the Democrats wanted lifted? The sanctions the whole Oil For Food scandal was doing an end run around anyway? (hey, whatever happened with Oil For Food? Why wasn’t France fined a hundred zillion for that? Did anybody anywhere get into any actual real trouble?)

A good analogy for the links between Saddam and bin Laden is the Cali and Medellín drug cartels. Both drug cartels (actually loose collections of families and criminal gangs) were serious national-security concerns to the United States. The two cartels competed for a share of the illegal drug market. However, neither cartel was reluctant to cooperate with the other when it came to the pursuit of a common objective — expanding and facilitating their illicit trade. The well-publicized and violent rise of the Medellín cartel temporarily obscured and overshadowed the rise of, and threat posed by, the Cali cartel, in the same way that 9/11 camouflaged the terror threat posed by Saddam. In reality Saddam and bin Laden were operating parallel terror networks aimed at the United States. Bin Laden just has the distinction of having made the first horrendous attack.

Given the evidence, it appears that we removed Saddam’s regime not a moment too soon.

And all of this is in the Duelfer Report, the document that the media claims proved there were NO WMDs in Iraq ... because they never even bothered to read past the first page’s Executive Summary.

And let’s not ignore the other salient facts: the pre-invasion inspectors were played like a violin, the post-invasion inspectors were often under fire, you can hide damn near anything under the sand in a desert, and allah alone knows how many of his researchers were silenced or never interviewed or killed during the invasion and their documents destroyed accidentally. In all likelihood things were even worse; we’ll never know.

via BlackFive

Posted by Drew458     on 09/17/2011 at 10:09 AM   
Filed Under: • Iraq • Tyrants and Dictators • War On Terror •  
• Comments (1) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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