Posted on 10/17/2014 7:33:31 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
New media accounts including coverage by NROs Patrick Brennan confirm what I repeatedly have written since the depths of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The late dictator Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass death, and the United States of America was correct to invade Iraq, find these toxins, and destroy them. Also vital: padlocking this Baathist general store for militant-Islamic terrorism.
As I explained on July 17, 2006:
While the liberal press gently sleeps, evidence continues to mount that Hussein had WMDs, though perhaps not in quantities that would bulge warehouses.
Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent, states a June 21 declassified summary of a report from the National Ground Intelligence Center. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraqs pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.
It turns out that based on open sources I vastly underestimated the size of Husseins stockpiles of deadly devices.
In this storys first outrage, it now transpires that Hussein had some 5,000 tank shells filled with sarin nerve gas, mustard gas, and other lethal agents. This is roughly ten times the arsenal that I reported that he possessed. Had I access to more accurate information back then, my pieces would have reflected the depth of Husseins supplies of these munitions.
These recent news stories overlook another discovery from 2004: The U.S. Department of Energy and the Pentagon removed 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium from Iraq that could potentially be used in a radiological dispersal device or diverted to support a nuclear weapons program, according to a DOE press release. This development was almost totally overlooked by the entire press corps, absent The Weekly Standards Stephen Hayes, author Richard Miniter, and yours truly.
Team Bushs near-silence about Saddam Husseins 3,894 pounds of uranium points to this storys second outrage: the Bush administrations phenomenally flaccid response to its most vociferous detractors on the WMD question.
Then-president George W. Bushs critics used the most bitter and vicious tones to accuse him of deceiving America and the world about weapons of mass death. Bush lied, people died was the Lefts relentlessly repeated anti-Bush indictment. The liberal fever swamps were rife with theories that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their pals at Halliburton concocted the WMD charges from whole cloth. Why? To justify a U.S. invasion in order to seize Iraqs oil fields. Lifting sanctions and simply letting Iraqs oil flow must have been too much trouble.
The notion that Operation Iraqi Freedom rested upon a giant foundation of even bigger lies severely damaged the reputations of the United States of America, Bush, the conservative movement, and the GOP the latter two of which tended to support the Iraq invasion. (So did then-senators Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry, and 108 other congressional Democrats at the time, although most later turned tail and pretended never to have voted to attack Iraq.)
Amid this wholesale meltdown of domestic and international public opinion, the Bush administration inexplicably and unforgivably yielded to the architects in Bushs political operation and sat on this treasure trove of exculpatory evidence. In fact, Bush did not lie about WMDs. They really existed and in enormous amounts. Moreover, they were sitting in the Iraqi desert, making U.S. GIs physically ill. (In yet another outrage, 17 soldiers reportedly were denied the medical attention or subsequent commendations that they deserved for handling these poisons. They also allegedly were told to clam up about what they saw.)
It is outrageous that the Pentagon and, apparently, Bushs political team concealed proof that Americas chief casus belli actually existed. Instead, the howling hyenas of the Left were allowed to gnaw away at Bushs political corpse.
Why did anyone involved in this disaster think that this would be good for America domestically or globally? How thick were the skulls of Bushs political advisers not to see the importance of presenting this information amid deafening shouts that the president and those of us who supported Operation Iraqi Freedom were a pack of filthy liars?
Anyone who aided and abetted this extremely destructive cover-up should be removed immediately and barred permanently from government agencies, political campaigns, and party organizations.
The third and most frightful outrage here is that some 2,500 of these canisters of nerve gas and mustard gas remained in Iraq. Rather than implement a policy of No WMD Left Behind, roughly half of Saddam Husseins WMDs were cast adrift in Iraq.
And now they are in the humane and prudent hands of the Islamic State.
Experts now say that these deadly weapons have degraded and pose no threat to anyone.
Would you bet your life on this?
At any time, the Islamic State can use these weapons against American and allied targets in the Middle East or anywhere else. If they detonate them and they work, hundreds or thousands could be killed.
Then again, they or their comrades in the Jihadist International could strap these artillery shells to sticks of dynamite and threaten to explode them. While the sarin and mustard gas might be inert, which mayor, governor, prime minister, or president could bank on that? Such uncertainty would give the Islamic State tremendous leverage: Obey our demands, or those sticks of dynamite will become a cloud of nerve gas.
Bush did not lie, we now learn.
However, in some twisted act of self-mutilation, his government severely wounded itself and America by hiding the abundant evidence that would have silenced Bushs and the USAs loudest and harshest opponents and enemies. Even worse, these imaginary weapons that proved to be all too real were abandoned in the sands for the Islamic State to adopt as their own.
And, before he prematurely withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq, Obama did nothing to fix any of this.
From the Euphrates to the Potomac, this is nothing short of governmental malpractice.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University.
You are the one to use an out of context quote to “prove” that Sarin, Mustard gas, etc. are not WMD’s. And that the U.S invaded Iraq thinking they would find nuke’s.
Do you actually believe that the only reason we invaded Iraq was because they had nukes? Please tell me you don’t believe that.
And you also believe that Bush and Condolezza Rice and apparently the rest of the administration believed Iraq had nukes?
Regardless, Sarin and Mustard gas are WMD’s. Oh, he also had a biological weapons program too. I’m sure those are not WMD’s either?
Also, I’m glad to know you think North Korea, Iran, Syria etc. acquiring nukes is funny. It will be a blast as soon as ISIS gets their hands on a few.
” WMDs were dismissed as being old, precursors as being insecticide and tons of yellowcake as unrefined or non-weapons grade.”
Yellowcake is processed uranium ore that is 99% U-238. It is mildly radioactive.
U-235 is weapons grade uranium. Yellowcake contains less than 1% of the U-235 isotope.
Buckets of babble...
“Regardless, Sarin and Mustard gas are WMDs”
They are WMDs if you are in howitzer range. Like Iranian troops in the Iran-Iraq War. Or Kurd villages that Saddam wanted to slaughter.
If you were 20 miles away from the Iraq border they weren’t exactly in the same league as a biological or a nuclear weapon.
The term WMD is flexible enough to be cover an artillery shell and a hydrogen bomb. When it’s left undefined by a politician it can prove highly useful in scaring the public.
Had that backwards. The point I’m trying to make is they either run a week candidate that we have to vote for even though we don’t like him. Win or lose, they got what they want. And conservatives don’t get much of a choice.
I agree with you on this. We may resent our weak, quasi-lib GOPe candidate, but given the alternative we vote for him anyway. This is why the GOPe is so dead-set on open primaries. They *want* the Dems to have a major, if not decisive, say in picking our candidate. They think that will ensure a broadly acceptable candidate ‘who can win’.
The fact that these wretched candidates lose time after time seems unimportant to the GOPe. Just avoiding a wingnut conservative is all that matters to them.
#20 I was shocked when I heard that Bush did this and so quickly to as if he / the Saudi’s knew who needed to be flown out of the country.
#58 As he has been there at least since 1977, image the money this guy has raised for various candidates. He whispers in their ear. Some win like the Bush’s and keep him in the game, and it is a game with him and others.
Nearly all his candidates he supported lost in the last election and Foxnews hires him...to tell us about how to win elections.
#68 The name should be Wove : )
“Republican Donors Really Ought To Blackball Karl Rove”
http://thehayride.com/2014/10/republican-donors-really-ought-to-blackball-karl-rove/
Good article here, I’m surprise more like these haven’t been posted here or maybe I am missing them.
That was the sales pitch. WE must invade Iraq before they acquire nukes and there are mushroom clouds over US cities,
At the time I really believed that Bush, Cheney, Rummmy,... knew what the hell they were doing, and it was a long painful lesson that they didn't.
Republican revisionism some still here is that we invaded and gave all those lives and $$$ over WWI era mustard gas,
No Republican gave a crap when they used mustard gas on Iran,
All the confusion is really over the term 'WMD'.
The REAL ISSUE should have been that Saddam had weapons what were prohibited by treaty, AND had used them.
“The REAL ISSUE should have been that Saddam had weapons what were prohibited by treaty, AND had used them. “
Saddam used the chemical weapons during the war with Iran and against Kurd separatists. I don’t know of Saddam using chemical weapons after Desert Storm but there were obviously plenty of them lying about.
Part of that was due to sloppy Iraqi practice. They had caches of weapons all over the country and didn’t appear to know where things were themselves. With any luck these will be old and unstable enough to blow up if ISIS finds them.
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