Critics can pipe down - U.S. will find WMDs

New York Daily News ^ | 5/09/03 | A.M. Rosenthal

[kattracks]

Small armies of American and European journalists and politicians are getting more annoyed than ever with President Bush.

This time, his offense is that American military search units have not yet found the smoking gun in Iraq - signs of Iraqi work on weapons of mass destruction.

Imagine - after using up a month or so wiping out dictator Saddam Hussein's government and army, American forces have frittered away another month hunting for the weapons that Saddam's specialists had been hiding for 20 years.

Iraq spent at least that much time working toward an armory of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons - and along the way hiding and rehiding them throughout the country.

And quite possibly, Saddam stashed abroad blueprints and material for making those weapons - stashed them with terrorist movements in preparation for revenge attacks against America.

If we think he would not or could not squirrel them away with terrorists operating out of other countries, we are misreading him, be he alive or in the grave, as foolishly as we have for decades.

I am informed by my scientific betters that the keys to making weapons of mass destruction are not secrets anymore. The fuels, poisons, machinery and technology can be bought on black markets scattered around the world. "Death markets" is a term more apt.

According to the Wisconsin Project, an organization based in Washington devoted to exposing the proliferation of nuclear and other devilish weapons, Iraq began its main effort to produce the fuel uranium 235 for nuclear bombs in 1982.

That was after an Israeli air strike at a French-built nuclear reactor in Iraq. The attack was carried out to slow down Saddam's drive for the nuclear bomb, and it did.

In 1997, according to an article by Gary Milhollin, head of the Wisconsin Project, Iraq created and tested a bomb that was a nuclear copy - it just had a nonnuclear core. To move from that to real nuclear bombs, Iraq needed "a mere 35 pounds of highly enriched uranium," according to Milhollin, who added, "Iraqis know how to build or import what they need."

"If the weapons inspections are at all compromised, the world could face the prospect of an Iraqi bomb in three to five years," Milhollin wrote.

Well, of course, before and since that time, the only thing the UN inspectors got was constant harassment. That included four days when, at gunpoint, the Iraqis demanded that the inspectors get out of the courtyard of a Baghdad building they wanted to inspect. Then Saddam ordered the inspectors out of the country altogether.

When they were allowed to return after a couple of years, the essential continuity of inspections was wrecked. They became virtually useless, with no hope of finding the secret manufacturing operations - nuclear, chemical and biological.

Yet throughout the decades of Saddam's drive, there were Americans who derided the very idea of Iraq's being able to make weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi Army already had used chemical weapons against its own people and Iranians.

It still is important to track down every country, and every company, that sold Iraq material and techniques for making weapons that bring human beings to writhing, screaming deaths or disintegration in a mushroom cloud. More time is needed - as much as necessary - for intensive U.S. hunting.

But I doubt the hunters will ever satisfy the perennial American critics of the U.S. military and the haters of Bush. They do not grasp, or want to grasp, that the search is for pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered across a whole country, not just for one glistening diamond.

The searches already have bagged Iraqi scientists who were (and maybe still are) close to Saddam. Many have the rank of general, awarded because they used their brains to turn out products like the dreaded nerve agent VX.

One day, the American search units will find the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. Until then, Americans and foreigners who constantly sneer at the President will condescendingly keep their stopwatches on the U.S. forces in Iraq.

I doubt that they bother the President, but they sure burn my belly.

Originally published on May 8, 2003

[JZoback]

This time, his offense is that American military search units have not yet found the smoking gun in Iraq - signs of Iraqi work on weapons of mass destruction

Yeah, it's a real pain in the arse....................................all those dead innocent bodies of Iraqi's keep getting in our way to finding the WMD

[xJones]

Those dead innocent bodies and the countless Iraqi relatives pitifully trying to find their missing family members among the dead are a distraction. Also there was the badly, then not badly at all looted national museum. Traces of deadly chemicals were found early on in the Euphrates River, indicating a hurried dumping. And who knows where Saddam stashed the majority of his WMD, possibly in Syria and then shipped to Lebanon. It will take a while to get to the bottom of this, but eventually most of the truth, at least, will come out.

[Movemout]

This guy has it right. The arguement will be lost on the foolish.

[Wonder Warthog]

Actually, it doesn't matter if we find the WMD's themselves--although that would be nice. It is FAR more important to find the paper trail/documentation. Given the Baathist govenrment's fantatic tendency for record-keeping, I don't see how that paper trail will NOT eventually be nailed down. It is virtually impossible to destroy all the documents in such a trail.