All I'm saying is that this guy should be checked out much more throurougly than Hamza was and I'd be skeptical before I oredered any further military action based on info from former members of Saddam's regime.
And if we did let all this WMD get out than the Iraq war was a failure in an important respect. We have an air force, we had control of Iraqi airspace. What are we doing letting 50 747s make their way to Damascus. Did Iraq even have that many planes. They had virtually no air force and whatever they did have was Russian so I highly doubt this guy is on the up and up. Saddam didn't have 50 Boeings. If he had said 50 Ilyushins or 50 Antonovs than maybe I'd believe him. Where were the boys in blue while all these flights of WMD were taking palce? Twiddling their thumbs? This would have been a turkey shhot and it would have been easy to force them to land or take them out.
What good was takng out Saddam and putting up a democracy if he just gave all his WMDs to Hezbollah, AQ, Syria, Iran or whatver other Jihadist killers may have gotten their hands on it in the past 3 yrs?
This guy could check out, but 1 interview on Hannity and Colmes does not an unimpeachable source make.
good points all, fol are my thoughts on why:
747's - though the general didn't specifically say so, I inferred fm the exchange that this was on some sort of quasi-civilian run. 747's aren't in use for military transport; nor would the cargo have been identified if using civilian airlines (for obvious reasons).
But let's say we suspected this was going on; the question then becomes, did we have enough proof? Was the case strong enough to take action against civilian airliners, and what if we were wrong? It's hard to monday-morning quarterback this thing...
I've often used the term "vermin" to describe these enemies we face. It becomes less an analogy and more literal as the war progresses; for in this issue, it's almost exactly like what an exterminator finds when flushing vermin from a home - they scramble elsewhere.
The no fly zones didn't cover the entire country...large portions of the North and South..It was legal for them to fly in the remainder.
The War Criminal General didn't totally convince me either.
Hi there..
There were not 50 planes. Only 2 modifeid civilian planes (all seats had been taken away). The number "50" is concerning the amount of sorties. Thus, 2 planes did those 50+ sorties.
The No Fly Zones were not patrolled 24/7. Iraq violated the zones hundreds of times from 1998 onwards. They knew how to play the game. Remember that the NFZs did not cover the entire country. The middle section of Iraq had no enforcement zone over it. That middle zone was right up to the Syrian border. Iraq even ignored the no fly zones with civil airliner flights and even Haj flights into Saudi. The Iraqi Air Force officer is talking about 50 flights - not 50 aircraft. Iraq still had a sizeable fleet of airliners at their disposal including Saddam's Presidential 747.
Up until the start of the conflict in March the Iraqi Air Force was still flying and generating healthy sortie rates. From about 1998 Iraq put everything they could back into military service. The embargo mean little as they could obtain lots of spares on the grey arms market.