| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq |
| Where’s the WMD? |
| 2003-05-15 |
| After over a month of looking, Coalition forces have not come up with the WMD smoking gun yet. There are many possible reasons why. Saddam, after 20 years of practice, has become a master of disbursing and hiding things and it will take some time to root his WMD program out. Alternatively, it is possible that just before we invaded, large portions of Iraq's WMD program were sent to Syria for safekeeping. The nightmare scenario though, particularly for those who justified the war in terms of finding WMDs, is that WMDs do not exist and have not since the end of Gulf War I. Unfortunately, with every day that passes, that possibility looms larger. Peace out, people. Keep reading... It is likely that if Saddam no longer had a WMD program he did not know it. Why else would he endure over a decade of crippling sanctions? If Saddam had ended his quest for WMDs, it would have been in his best interest to open the doors wide and let the world see. By playing as the model citizen he would have regained control of his oil wealth and quickly been able to make Iraq a regional superpower again. Instead, his henchmen did everything possible to obfuscate the true WMD picture and to thwart any inspection teams. If they had nothing to hide, they sure worked hard at trying to hide it. What if they were not just hiding a possible WMD program from inspectors, but also hiding from Saddam the fact that no such program existed? I'll summarize: The article posits that a real WMD program would have been so expensive, that the country, under sanctions, couldn't have afforded Plague and Palaces. However, nobody wanted to give Saddam the bad news that he couldn't have both. Thus, they undertook an elaborate charade to fool Saddam, since it was easier to fool him about a non-existent WMD program than about a non-existent palace. They had to fool US Intelligence also, not wanting the Merkins to tell Saddam he had no WMD, and that his lackeys were lying to him. The mobile bio-labs, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, and being mobile, they could do the pea-under-the-shell-game and make Saddam think he had hundreds crawling around in the countryside. |
| Posted by:Ptah |
| #4 There's one other possibility that I believe everyone is overlooking - that the weapons were designed, that the Iraqi scientists began building them, the military began to get ready to employ them, and would have used them. In between the creation and the distribution, however, everything has to go exactly perfect, or you have a bunker full of dead scientists that either has to be sealed for a gazillion years, or incinerated. We've already seen that Iraqi quality control was about as effective as their ability to stop sandstorms. I'm sure there are military and political leaders who are sweating bullets, hoping they DON'T find those ghastly remains. We've also learned just how paranoid Hussein was, and how he never trusted ANYONE - he had groups looking over the shoulder of people looking over the shoulder of people looking over the shoulders of his people. There's a very good possibility that the WMD that were created, built, and possibly even distributed, were also buried - deeply - with instructions to only dig them up when Hussein gave the word. Right now, getting "the word" out to anybody is kinda hard for old Sadsack. Eventually, someone will find those hidden stashes. I truthfully feel very sorry for anyone that does that. It'll make the guy eating "yellow cake" look like a genius. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2003-05-15 22:24:35 |
| #3 I'd break the Iraq situation into 2 programs: 1) Weapons Research. We've seen evidence come out that this was happening. The test stand, goat fertility, etc. 2) Weapons Production. This may or may not have been happening. If it wasn't happening, then a group of senior Iraqis were running a charade designed to convince Mukhabarat that it did exist. We could well have had video of people briefing Saddam on the status of the weapons program. We likely had copies of a large portion of Mukhabarat internal communications. Kruschev knew he didn't have many nukes, and so did Ike. Ike let him get away with the lie rather than launch an arms race. Kennedy called him on it, and we got a real arms race. Kimmie may believe he has 200 nukes, with missiles capable of reaching the west coast. I'm not sure how he'd react if he started to suspect he was being lied to. The Russians may have already started this ball rolling. Back to Iraq, I see no shame in being deceived as long as we can honestly say we were caught up in a deception created for Saddam. Somewhere in those documents we recovered, there's probably ample proof that Saddam believed he had a weapons program. I think that should be released at some point. Unwinding further... in the case of biological weapons, the research itself is potentially more dangerous than the production. It only takes 1 infection with an engineered virus to bring about the end of civilization. Evidence seems to indicate Dr. Taha was experimenting with things like viral hemorragic fever and smallpox. We've already found one facility that appears to have been suitable. The only other piece we need are the research notes. With SARS running around right now, it shouldn't take much to convince the world that Iraq was very, very dangerous. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2003-05-15 21:19:13 |
| #2 Oh, forgot another possibility: The henchmen took the money budgeted for the WMD program, and pocketed it. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-05-15 19:04:40 |
| #1 Up until the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the CIA kept showing them as economically strong because the CIA was reading the internal reports it was gathering in the Soviet Union. It never entered their minds that such organizations reach a point where everyone is lying to everyone else and all the reports were just garbage. Garbage which the CIA treated as truth. |
| Posted by: Don 2003-05-15 18:48:02 |