Graphic via Wired.com. See wired.com for many related WMD articles.
Our article yesterday supplied some links and commentary regarding the continuing boneheadedness of those commentators and newsies on the right who repeat the leftist dogma that Bush lied about WMD’s in Iraq and that none were found, not already known about. Today via Patriot Post we received a related article, first published yesterday at FrontPage, which does an excellent job on relevant historic analysis. We recommend the entire article as the excerpt below is but one aspect to the expose. Also review the comment section for added pithy summations and the responses to leftist trolls’ comments.
Saddam’s WMDs: The Left’s Iraq Lies Exposed June 23, 2014 by Arnold Ahlert
The Obama administration, eager to leave a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq” as the president described it in 2011, paid little heed to the prospect of large swaths of that nation being overrun by terrorists who have taken over key cities and military bases, and confiscated sophisticated American military equipment in the process. One defense official conceded as much, telling the Wall Street Journal that had they known the Maliki government would lose control so soon, they might not have left the weapons behind. And Psaki’s contention that the weapons could not be moved safely even by terrorists is hardly reassuring when one considers the reality that ISIS uses suicide bombings as one of it chief military tactics.
A far more critical consideration is the possibility that many of the Iraqi Sunnis who have joined ISIS due in large part to their alienation by the Shi’ite-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki are comprised of former Saddam Hussein loyalists, some of whom may have working knowledge of the chemical weapons stored at Al Muthanna. Former WMD specialist Paul Perrone extrapolated on where such working knowledge might lead. “I’m more concerned with the prospect that these Muslim terrorists have access to formulas or precursors that would enable them to create their own WMD,” he warned.
The latest revelations on the details of Saddam’s weapons stockpile, now potentially in the hands of Sunni radicals, affirm the Bush administration’s characterization of Iraq as a territory situated in a hotbed of radicalism, flooded with a bevy of highly dangerous weapons and overseen by a criminal rogue regime. Indeed, the WMDs are to say nothing of the Hussein government’s nuclear weapons program, also put to a stop by intervention in Iraq. In 2008, American and Iraqi officials had “completed nearly the last chapter in dismantling Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program with the removal of hundreds of tons of natural uranium from the country’s main nuclear site,” the New York Times reported. Approximately 600 tons of “yellowcake” was removed from the Tuwaitha facility, the main site for Iraq’s nuclear program. According to global security.org, uranium enrichment levels of 95 percent were achieved at the Tuwaitha facility. That site was also the location of the Osirak nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel in 1981.
And in what sounded like a harbinger of the future, the Times noted that although the yellowcake could not be used in its current form to produce a nuclear device or dirty bomb, the “unstable environment” in Iraq necessitated its removal, lest it fall into the “wrong hands.” In an updated correction to the article, the Times notes that the Osriak nuclear reactor “theoretically produced plutonium, which can fuel an atomic bomb.”
The Left dismissed this reality by claiming the yellowcake had been in Iraq prior to 1991 and thus was not the same yellowcake Bush referred to in his 2003 State of the Union address as part of his justification for invading Iraq. Led by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, the emboldened anti-war Left attempted to turn the claim into a scandal saying that Bush knowingly lied to the American public regarding Iraq’s effort to procure yellowcake from Niger.
Ultimately, Wilson and his story were thoroughly discredited a year later by a Senate Select Committee report, which further noted that President Bush had been fully justified in including the infamous “16 words” regarding that intelligence in his speech. Moreover the left has never bothered to explain why yellowcake procured before 1991 was any less dangerous in terms of its WMD potential, given Saddam Hussein’s regular defiance of international law also enunciated by Bush as one of the primary reasons for deposing him.
Sealing Al Muthanna while Saddam was in power was no doubt looked on as a joke by Saddam. He had a store house of WMD’d being “guarded” by a ridiculously small group of UN blue helmets? He could overwhelm that in a heart beat were it to come to that. It was his responsibility to destroy them and he dithered and the world let him get away with that for too long.
Given his ability to overwhelm the UN blue helmets it is a joke to say that they were not under his control. However Bush i.e. the US military WAS in control subsequent to the invasion. So a decision to delay, however stupid was not intentionally insidious. Obama left the Muthanna stash vulnerable not Bush. Why didn’t he order them destroyed prior to his pulling out any meaningful control over them, Obama who has been in charge of our presence in Iraq for going on six years? R Mall
