Posted on 02/05/2006 9:13:22 PM PST by Anti-Bubba182
For almost three years, the conventional wisdom regarding Iraq WMD’s prior to our invasion was that Saddam never had them, we knew it, Bush lied, and we invaded anyway because we wanted their oil, or to establish military bases, or because George Bush is a meany, or because the Jews told us to, or…just because America is eeeevil and we like to throw our weight around just to remind the Europeans of that fact every once and while.
I pretty much accepted this CW - well, not all that other stuff but certainly the analysis that Saddam did not have WMD for years prior to our invasion. After all, this was the Duelfer Report’s conclusion (with one important caveat that we’ll get to in a minute) as well as the conclusion of several bi-partisan reports from Congress.
But something always bothered me about this conclusion, a nagging itch at the back of my mind. And that is the overwhelmingly belief by the world’s best intelligence agencies that Saddam did indeed have stockpiles of WMD in the six months leading up to the war. The French, the British, the Germans, The Israeli’s, the United Nations (UNSCOM and IAEA), not to mention the CIA, DIA, and most politicians here in this country.
That’s quite a number of people to be dead wrong about such a huge issue.
And that’s what’s always bothered me. It bothered Charles Duelfer also, the fair minded and thorough former CIA and State Department expert who also took a turn as an inspector for UNSCOM. In his report on WMD, one little noticed caveat that Duelfer mentioned appeared in an addendum to the document:
"The CIA’s chief weapons inspector said he cannot rule out the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were secretly shipped to Syria before the March 2003 invasion, citing “sufficiently credible” evidence that WMDs may have been moved there.
Inspector Charles Duelfer, who heads the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), made the findings in an addendum to his final report filed last year. He said the search for WMD in Iraq—the main reason President Bush went to war to oust Saddam Hussein—has been exhausted without finding such weapons. Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s.
But on the question of Syria, Mr. Duelfer did not close the books. “ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war,” Mr. Duelfer said in a report posted on the CIA’s Web site Monday night."......
The most reasonable conclusion is that a lot of material was transferred there. There is not the political will to demand an accounting by the Syrians let alone invade the country, especially with the Iran situation heating up. Too bad we did not allow for this in the beginning of the Iraq war. It was entirely predictable that the Iraqis would transfer materials to the one friendly regieme in the area.
I thought we had pictures.
What we have in this case is a massive truck traffic to Syria prior to the War and, with the Sada revelations, air traffic as well.
What was in those trucks?
I doubt it was Uday's porno collection.
The most reasonable conclusion is that the shipments contained WMD materials.
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