- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

Saddam’s WMD Still Alive And Well, in Syria

Here’s a point I’ve been making for some time, now…. as expressed by Terry A. Hurlbut at the site Conservative News and Views: [1]

Everyone remembers the anti-propaganda campaign that followed: “Bush Lied; People Died!”, “General Betray-Us,” et cetera ad nauseam. A few voices, most notably that of Sean Hannity, insisted that Saddam Hussein did have WMD, but had someone truck them out of Iraq and into Syria. Last night, a retired general came forward to vindicate Hannity, Bush, and yours truly, among others.

Saddam Hussein certainly had WMD many years before Operation Iraqi Freedom. He used them on Kurdish towns and villages in northern Iraq. (Incidentally that’s the one part of Iraq that has stayed relatively calm lately.) The suffering of those villagers prompted the Northern No-fly Zone during the Clinton administration. It also prompted then-President Bill Clinton to say that Saddam Hussein had to go.

To make the case for war in 2002 and 2003, General Colin Powell and others told the United Nations Security Council that the US Air Force had evidence of an active chemical-biological warfare program in Iraq. Among other things, Powell showed the UN diagrams of mobile laboratories, built into truck trailers, for mixing chemical and biological weapons in the field. (You cannot mix chemical or biological WMD in advance. You must mix them fresh and use them right away, or they are useless.)

TRUCKSsyria-iraq-wmd11 [2]But here’s the thing…  Remember that long line of trucks [3] we saw from our satellites watching the region.. and the ones the CIA has been unable to deny existed?  [4](Picture, right)Well, now , suddenly, Syria has Chem weapons they didn’t have prior to that point.  And is using them in Syria’s norther end, an area Assad has never been able to control very well.

Then, earlier this week, someone – we do not yet know who – launched a chemical attack on some civilians in Aleppo.

Aleppo is the largest city in Syria. Bashar al-Assad has lost control over it. And when the story broke, Assad’s mouthpieces said the rebels had used chemical weapons against those people.

Last night, Major General Paul Vallely USA (retired) gave this [5] interview to WorldNetDaily. (See also this video [6].) First, he said the Assad regime attacked the people of Aleppo with chlorine gas, and tried to frame the rebels for it.

Then he said the Assad regime has used WMD against their people last summer – and he, General Vallely, has seen the photos that prove it.

Now you know why Sean Hannity and Liz Cheney said what they said, when they said it.

And then he said:

If you go back to January through March of 2003, we had intelligence in the Defense Department that the Russians helped move, by convoy, a lot of the chemical and biological weapons into two locations in Syria and one in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. We think Russia and Iran have enhanced their inventory. The vast majority of those chemical and biological weapons were from Iraq

And there you go. In short had we not gone to the UN with hat in hand begging for permission on what needed doing, (somethiung you may recall I objected to at the time) we’d likely have caught them red handed, and the case would have been blown wide open.  Further, since the election of Obama, the Prime Minister of Iraq has been backing Syrian leader Bashar Assad over the protesters against his regime, [7] most of whom he has been violently and indiscriminately machine gunning down:

BAGHDAD — As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

“The unrest in Syria has exacerbated the old sectarian divides in Iraq because the Shiite leaders have grown close to Assad and the Sunnis identify with the people,” said Joost Hiltermann, the International Crisis Group’s deputy program director for the Middle East.

He added: “Maliki is very reliant on Iran for his power and Iran is backing Syria all the way. The Iranians and the Syrians were all critical to bringing him to power a year ago and keeping him in power so he finds himself in a difficult position.”

Iraq and Syria have not had close relations for years, long before the American invasion. During the sectarian violence here that broke out after the invasion, Iraqi leaders blamed Syria for allowing suicide bombers and other militants to enter the country.

But Syria and Iran have had close ties, a factor in the recalibration of relations between Syria and Iraq. Last year, Iran pressured Mr. Assad into supporting Mr. Maliki for prime minister, which eventually helped him gain a second term. Since then, Mr. Maliki and Mr. Assad have strengthened relations, signing trade deals and increasing Syrian investment in Iraq.

So it appears that with Saddam gone, things could have changed had we had a foreign policy which allowed for capitalizing on the Bush effort. Obama would not. And so we now have Iranian WMD in Syria, being used against the Syrian people.

But of course at the core of this is the fact that Saddams WMD did exist, and to a large extent, still do, in Syrian hands. If there’s any scandal here it is that the current administration MUST already know all of this, and not only have they been hiding it, but they refuse to react to it.