As
someone who led the company that transported 550 metric tons of
yellowcake uranium—enough to make fourteen Hiroshima-size bombs—from
Saddam’s nuclear complex in the Iraq War’s notorious “Triangle of Death”
for air shipment out of the country, I know Baathist Iraq’s WMD
potential existed. In early 2008, we secretly moved over several nights
140 truckloads carrying 5500 barrels of extremely heavy radioactive
material provided to Iraq as part of the French-supplied Osiraq reactor
destroyed by Israeli fighter bombers in 1981. The virulently
anti-Semitic Saddam had announced “here begins the Arab bomb” and the
Israelis took him at his word.
The
recent article in the New York Times, however, caught us all by
surprise. Random caches of old chemical weapons found post-invasion were
old news, but not “roughly 5,000”
warheads and bombs, many filled with still active, nerve agent. That’s
an enormous quantity even if evidently left over from the 1980s
Iran-Iraq War. Just “antiques,” as the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung
quaintly put it at a Center for Strategic and International Studies
forum on Iraq.
At
the least, this shocker (after so many years of repetitious “Bush lied
[about WMD], people died”) further points to the world’s inability to
trust that the UN inspectors could ever realistically certify Saddam
clean of his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. He had
to be deposed, and the only way to do it was for us to invade and
overthrow his dictatorship. Here was a genocidal, expansionist tyrant
who had used chemical weapons on his own people and that of a
neighboring nation (Iran), publically celebrated 9/11, and allowed a
chemical weapons laboratory affiliated with al-Qaeda to
operate within his security forces’ reach inside his country’s borders
in contested Kurdistan (Khurmal).
The
article in the Times references the Duelfer Report that summed up the
official American investigation of Iraq’s WMD as definitive in that
there were no ongoing WMD programs pre-invasion, yet fails to mention
that every section of the report on the different types of weapons of
mass destruction concluded that the evidence gathered by investigators
clearly indicated that once sanctions were removed Saddam would
reinstate his WMD programs. In addition, the article mentions that the
chemical weapons program was not active for over ten years, but not the
biological weapons program, which extended into 1996 and was only
discovered because Saddam’s son-in-law defected, even after five years
of aggressive UN inspections.
There’s
no
question in my mind, Saddamist Iraq would have reconstituted its WMD
programs once UN sanctions faded away—a push Security Council
veto-wielding members Russia and France were actively working toward
because of oil field opportunities. (Petroleum companies from both
countries signed huge, new contracts with Saddam pre-invasion.) And
given the yellowcake inventory, nuclear weapons with available Pakistani
and North Korean technology might not have been far off. After over ten
years in effect, the sanctions system was actively degrading with
banned flights landing in Baghdad, the Oil for Food program corrupted,
and, as a result, would have collapsed if we had not invaded—thus
leaving Saddam free to threaten the world again with WMD.
The
greater problem, however, of significant quantities of chemical weapons
hidden at some date prior to the US invasion points to a current and
growing threat. The
leader of the neo-Saddamists allied now with ISIS is Izzat al-Douri, a
former Iraqi army general and last member of the senior Baathist
leadership not executed or imprisoned. There is a distinct possibility
that Saddam’s minions hid these munitions with the intention of
disinterring them for deterrent use once again. And in fact, this is why
Saddam’s military and secret police leaders never ceased to believe
Iraq possessed WMD and could therefore project terror onto the Kurds and
the rest of the region (Israel and Iran, specifically) until the end
because Iraq did possess WMD, even after the dictator’s death by
hanging. The Iraqi army and security services did not handle “special”
weapons without the knowledge of the regime’s leaders. So to think that
Saddam and his immediate circle, including al-Douri, did not know the
locations of the WMD discussed in the Times article begs credulity.
Much of the area where the “antique,” yet still potentially
potent chemical weapons discovered by US forces is now in the hands of
ISIS, the forces of al-Douri, and their allied Sunni Arab tribes
undergirding the “caliphate” occupying almost a third of Iraq. With
hundreds of Western passport holders fighting in Syria and Iraq, the
most immediate threat to the United States is the spread of jihadi
terrorism to Europe now that ISIS has a border with Turkey, a gateway to
the EU.
Can one even imagine the impact of a weaponized sarin-gas attack in Paris?