What wold they be doing? Fellow Baathists make a deal. Iraq pays Russia to covertly transport these weapons to Syria. Syria to continue development of WMD. Russia gets a payday and a continued partner in the Arab world and maybe a base of ops against Chechnyan and al Queda terrorists. Saddam gets satisfaction of embarrasing US when no WMDs are found. Syria uses the explosives to arm Iraqi terrorists with weapons it,on paper, does not have. Thus deniability.
Convoluted but does it make any sense?
Convoluted and does indeed make some sense, but I still have trouble seeing Russia in bed with Islamists after what they've gone through in Chechnya. Then again, Saddam wasn't an Islamist...he just made common cause with them against the Great Satan. Hell, Saddam killed more of *his own* Islamist whackjobs between 1979 and 2003 than we probably ever will.
It's just damned shortsighted on the Russians' part, though. Maybe, like you said, they figured that Iraq was a useful partner (and they certainly were economically) and that Saddam would not turn on them or provide aid and support to the Chechens and their allies.
If the Russian government was involved in this, and not just private or rogue concerns in Russia, then this is hugh. We've always felt that Pootie Poot was dealing with Saddam behind our back while blocking us in the Security Council again and again, we just couldn't prove it. Now, we're finding out that not only was he protecting his own economic interests, and protecting his own slush funds from Oil-For-Bribes, maybe he was also actually helping the Iraqis move weapons of slightly-less-than-mass-if-you're-a-Democrat destruction out of Iraq and away from us. That is BIG.
}:-)4