Posted on 06/10/2003 10:45:54 PM PDT by LdSentinal
Here are seven things the world knows without a speck of doubt regarding Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons programs -programs that now are at the center of a debate over the sincerity of U.S. and British prewar claims.
• We know he used chemical weapons many times in the 1980s, first against Iranian troops and then against his own people. Corpses numbering in the tens of thousands testify to these crimes.
• We know he developed biological weapons such as anthrax in part because he admitted this to the United Nations.
• We know that for more than 20 years he has sought to develop the capacity to build nuclear weapons.
• We know he refused to account fully for his stockpiles of chemical and biological programs after the first Gulf War because he spent the next 12 years fencing with U.N. inspectors and defying U.N. resolutions (at least 17 relating to this very theme). In 1998, Saddam threw the inspectors out of Iraq, only allowing them to return late last year when it became clear that if he didn't the U.S. would attack.
• We know U.N. weapons experts believed that Saddam was concealing both an illegal weapons program and stockpiles of substances such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and VX, a deadly nerve agent. They said so repeatedly right up to the start of this year's war. On Jan. 27, for example, chief inspector Hans Blix, who openly opposed the war, told the Security Council that Saddam refused to come clean on his weapons programs and that various biological and chemical munitions remained unaccounted for.
• We know that Bush officials and U.N. experts were not alone in their conviction. The speeches of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, William Cohen and other members of the previous administration are replete with references to Saddam's concealment of weapons.
• Finally, we know that Iraqi defectors confirmed Saddam's weapons programs and his ongoing efforts to upgrade them.
So why haven't those weapons been found? We don't know, but the failure to find them is hardly proof that dangerous stockpiles didn't exist in the recent past. If Saddam had nothing to hide in 1998, for example, his decision to throw the inspectors out and thus trigger U.S. bombs and renewed resolve for sanctions against his country makes absolutely no sense. The same is true of his refusal to account for the known stockpiles of such weapons as late as this year.
It's of course possible - and increasingly likely - that administration officials overstated the short-term threat from Saddam's illegal weapons before taking this nation to war. It's even possible they did so deliberately, although no one has produced evidence of that. But the importance of such weapons was never simply that Saddam would use them in May if he wasn't defeated in April. The problem was that Saddam's appetite for these weapons was ferocious, and he'd proved that he would subordinate everything to obtain them. Yet the only thing keeping his ambition in check during the 1990s was the costly U.N. sanctions, which had lost virtually all international support (save from the U.S.) before last year.
Had Bush not made an issue of Iraq by designating it part of the "axis of evil," U.N. sanctions would have failed to survive another year or so, and Saddam would have been free to spend his oil treasure any way he liked. But thanks to the recent war, that ambition has died - and with it the fearful likelihood of Saddam using those weapons at a later date.
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" It's of course possible - and increasingly likely - that administration officials overstated the short-term threat from Saddam's illegal weapons before taking this nation to war."
It's also possible, and increasingly likely, that liberals will use whatever means are at hand to discredit this President, even while admitting the obvious--such as, Iraq had and probably still has WMDs.
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