Ana aasif, would you have any Grey Poupon?
It’s no surprise to those who have followed the intel on the post invasion of Iraq that in all likelihood the remaining WMD stockpiles in Iraq went to Syria as U.S. troops invaded the country. While the media was decrying the supposed absence of WMDs in the country, and Hollywood writers were busy writing left wing fantasies such as The Green Zone, the Saddam regime had already sent the bulk of both its fixed wing air assets and its chemical weapons over the border into the custody of the neighboring Baathist regime’s hands. I remember talking to a MSgt friend in Marine Corps intel back in 2005 about the embarrassing lack of stockpiles in Iraq. He simply laughed at me and said, “Dude, that’s because it’s all in Syria.” He made sure to follow with, “And you didn’t hear that from me because I don’t know shit. Feel me?”
Back then, as always, the same diligent academics and journalists who were so enthralled by the current President were a tad too over eager to chronicle history before the final verdict came in. I don’t refer to the slightly preemptive feel good awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for proper posturing, good vibes and swell intentions. I refer to the willful ignorance of reams of intelligence indicating that not only did the Saddam regime still have WMDs in 2002 but, in fact, had consciously transferred them through the Wild West of Iraq, the same porous region which occupied Marines for years as they attempted to stop the flow of weapons and jihadists flowing the opposite direction as they battled the “Iraqi freedom fighters” hell bent on blowing up Shia holy sites and neighborhoods.
Yesterday Victor Davis Hanson, one of the good guys, and a superbly articulate Professor of History, spelled this out in his usually devastating manner:
There are suggestions that at least some of Assad’s supposed stockpile may have come from Saddam Hussein’s frantic, eleventh-hour efforts in 2002 to hide his own arsenals of weapons of mass destruction in neighboring Syria. Various retired Iraqi military officers have alleged as much. Although the story was met with general neglect or scorn from the American media, the present U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, long ago asserted his belief in such a weapons transfer.
The Bush administration fixated on WMD in justifying the invasion of Iraq while largely ignoring more than 20 other writs to remove Saddam, as authorized by Congress in October 2002. That obsession would come back to haunt George W. Bush when stockpiles of deployable WMD failed to turn up in postwar Iraq. By 2006, “Bush lied; thousands died,” was the serial charge of the antiwar Left. But before long, such depots may finally turn up in Syria.
…
The moral of the story is that history cannot be written as it unfolds. In the case of Iraq, we still don’t know the full story of Saddam’s WMD, the grand strategic effects of the Iraq War, the ripples from the creation of the Iraqi republic, or the relative degree of incompetence of any American administration at war in the Middle East — and we won’t for many years to come.
And so us jingos, fanatics and serial warmongers wait, as we always do, to again be vindicated by the ebb and flow of historical events. Which is, perhaps, the reason George W. Bush sits so contently, and without concern, ready for the final, actual judgement of history to be levied.
Category: Politics
A small amount of chemical/biological weapons were found and disclosed in 2006 before we deployed again. It was common knowledge while we were on the border that the Syrians were testing aircraft-borne deployment of chemical weapons because we would watch their activity at night.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/
Someone, somewhere will find this article and blow a gasket. We’re about to see what happens to people when the beliefs that have been shaping their opinions for the past 12 years turn out to be false. And I have a feeling it isn’t going to be pretty.
Moving a substantial amount of WMD might not be as difficult as one would think if you’re not overly worried about safety in transit.
For the sake of argument: assume 55-gallon drums were used to transport liquid WMDs (not a good long-term choice, but probably good enough for a one-time transit if transferred to more permanent containers at the distant end). If those liquid WMDs weighed 7.5 lb/gallon, the total weight per drum would be around 450lbs. The barrel is 23″ in diameter.
As standard flatbed truck is 102″ wide and 48′ long, and can transport 24 tons. It would thus hold 4 x 24 = 96 barrels. These would weigh about 43,000lb and would hold about 40,000lb of agent – 20 tons. Add 2 tons for dunning/netting/tiedowns, and that’s still within the weight a single flatbed can carry.
You’d thus need about 50 truckloads for each 1000 short tons of agent – which means a 50-truck convoy could move 1000 short tons of agent per turn. I suspect Saddam Hussein could rather easily have come up with 50 trucks, 50 flatbeds – and the same number of expendable drivers – had he wanted to in late 2002/early 2003.
Hondo–I was going to say, even if he had 20,000 liters of any liquid, that would be easily enough transported with a single tanker truck.
NHSparky: that would be around 20 short tons of agent per truckload. 96 55-gallon drums holds about that same amount (a bit under 5300 gallons). Pre-war estimates by the CIA (now made public) were that Iraq possessed between 100 and 500 MT (110 to 550 short tons) of chem agent. That amount could have easily been moved in a single lift by a relatively small convoy (between 6 and 23 trucks plus escorts).
https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/iraq_wmd/Iraq_Oct_2002.htm#05
Exactly–and assuming 2-3 escorts per truck, frankly, who’s going to notice 100 vehicles spaced out over a couple hundred miles? Hell, anyone ever driven I-15 from Barstow to Vegas lately?
I know Iraqi highways are nowhere near that crowded, but that’s really a small amount of traffic.
The Syrians have always had their own chemical weapons. And they had them in the field, as we found out in eastern Lebanon in 1982. What they might have now may, or may not, have come from Iraq. Personally, I find it entirely plausible that Iraq shipped off their stuff to hide in Syria, but people like General Colin Powell say quite explicitly that it didn’t exist. Or at least not on a large scale. He says that very clearly in his book “It Worked For Me”, in a chapter on his WMD speech to the UN. I would think that if he had any lingering doubts, he simply wouldn’t have talked about it.
I hate that damn WMD thing being a defining item in that Presidency. The question I ask as a former unit NBC person to the lefties who say none were found, is: Please define Nuclear, Biological and Chemical substances that can cause destruction. If the sum of the parts can cause destruction then they are all weapons and nothing can be singled out because if fits their meme that none were found. Period.
Thing is, from even before we invaded Iraq, there were reports, and allegations of images of, convoys of Iragi trucks moving WMD stocks into Syria, and being located for storage in the Bekaa valley.
Why anyone would realistically question this is beyond me. Saddam most definitely had chemical weapons, and likely had biological in or near production. He most certainly was attempting to develop nuclear weapons.
The Baathist political machine was started in Syria, and it isn’t any leap of faith to believe that Saddam was moving his stockpiles of strategic material there in order to have a fall-back position for him and his core of supporters for to operate against Coalition forces. He planned on surviving and trying to retake Iraq from a base among his friends in Syria.
Now Syria has complete control of those WMD’s and the ability to employ them. I’m certain that AQ, Hezzbollah and others have a pretty good idea on the location of some, if not all of those WMD stores too.
The policy of these United States OUGHT to be the location and destruction of those WMD stocks, through whatever means are required.
The question never should have been whether he had them or not,but rather where did they go?
If you find bread crumbs, a dirty knife with peanut butter and jelly on it, and the empty peanut butter and jelly jars someone obviously made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich there. Point being we found a few materials that are the by product of WMD construction, used equipment in making WMDs, and empty storage places, so obviously something was going on there. To believe that there weren’t WMDs in Iraq at least shortly prior to invasion, if not during the actual invasion, you must be wearing some seriously strong tin foil hats.
On a side note… President Bush in giving his speech shortly before the invasion gave 5 reasons that we were invading Iraq. Only 1 was WMDs. This whole WMD not being there thing is kind of like how anti-war folks say there was no proof that Saddam was supporting terrorists, but there were terrorists training in Iraq.
Just reread my post and to clarify… It was not directed at any previous post.
You could show all the evidence, pictures, diagrams, and everything else that proves what we know, but to jackwagons who want to believe that Boosh is evil it will never take. insipid and joe will come on here and completely ignore it. I have told people over and over again about the evidence that weapons were there was found and most of it was taken across the border into Syria they just hop on the “Bush Lied” bandwagon. It is like teaching a pig to sing… I also always say history will tell a very different story than what we are hearing today. When I tell people we weren’t fighting just an insurgency in Iraq we were also fighting a war against Iran and Syria they don’t believe me. Hell a lot of the bomb making technology I was seeing was out of Iran. Of course people would site well sunnis and shiites don’t like each other…forgetting the fact they do when they have a common enemy. I gotta stop before I get on a rant here.
@14 Jason, I lay this squarely at the the door of the MSM. Instead of connecting the dots — which is what investigative journalism is supposed to do — from day 1, they have howled to the skies that those WMD never existed. Bush couldn’t be right about that, don’t you see? Or we would have had a justified war on our hands, and the liberals just can’t stand that. It has nothing to do with truth, it’s all about perception. To be able to continue to scream “unjusified aggression” against us, those WMD had to disappear, never be found, never exist. I can almost guarantee that if Syria were to use those weapons today, they’d be identified as belonging to Syria or someone else — ANYONE else — other than Iraq.
If the allegations of WMD being spirited across the IZ-Syrian border are true…what explains the previous Administration not making the case.
They made a lackluster case for it going in, and one would think we would have sufficient NRO evidence to back it up after the fact.
I’ve always wondered why the MSM totally ignored a bunch of gassed Iraqis, and never ask “Well, gee…if he’ll gas his own people, what will he do to our troops?”
You know, the kind of questions they ask about EVERYTHING ELSE on the planet.
@PN – “I’ve always wondered why the MSM totally ignored a bunch of gassed Iraqis..”
The gassed Iraqi’s were one of the centerpieces in the media for the run-up to the invasion.
It was mentioned, but not pursued. That’s the point. In every other storyline you can name, the MEDIA drives the news. They don’t wait around for FBI, CIA, NSA, or any other alphabet agency to give them their storyline. They get into wherever, talk with folks in shadows, get unauthorized info, clandestine photographs, you name it.
That wasn’t done with the dead from the gas attack in Iraq. Pictures of the dead, and that was it. When our troops went in, very inconclusive evidence was found for gas weapons, much less gas weapon stockpiles. Criminals scrub crime scenes all the time, but this time, there was no media followup. None. It was all “the WMD must not exist because the troops didn’t find them.” The MSM didn’t attempt to pursue it in Iraq. Or Syria. Or Iran. Or anywhere else. Our troops couldn’t cross the borders, but the MSM could have – maybe even should have – but didn’t. The story stopped at what the troops found (and didn’t find) because the MSM WANTED the story to stop there.
Well, if you’re positive that WMD existed…then anything less than a media expose’ is going to be a letdown I suppose.
If you’re skeptical [especially since the previous Administration didn’t push any evidence they may have had] then the lack of media coverage over speculation isn’t a surprise.
CI, if something is important enough to be skeptical about, it’s important enough to do more than speculate about it. It’s also important to understand WHY the skepticism exists, from BOTH sides, not just one.
It might surprise you that I am “skeptical” about the WMD in Iraq. I have several reasons for that. What I don’t question is that Iraq did have gas weapons, and employed them at least once that we know of. It’s doubtful all of the weapons available were used in the attack on the people that were gassed. So where did the rest go? Another question: Why was that offered as a reason for going into Iraq? Other reasons were just as viable, and probably more pertinent. Links to Al-Qaeda, for example, were not given the importance I thought they should have. I could go on, but you see my point.
My complaint is that the MSM didn’t act in the fashion we have come to expect from them. I’m “skeptical” about them for that reason in this instance.
PN – I understand a bit better now. I share your skepticism of both WMD and the media. I see the MSM used too many times as a crutch and I tend to react accordingly [not that I have any faith whatsoever in their investigative skills; I just don’t chalk it up to politics as much].
I still think the pertinent question rests with the previous Administration; there was a huge net plus to be had if WMD did exist up to the point of the invasion, and there was concrete evidence to support that. I didn’t agree with a good deal of the policies coming out of 1600, but I don’t believe they were inept enough to pass that opportunity up.
CI, this is an area where my frustration levels peak rapidly, and I can easily end up saying wild things and ‘jacking the bandwidth with a complete rant. I was closer to government workings back then than I am now, and I’ll simply say this: there are some people I’d like to be locked in a room with and back them up against a wall with the questions I have — both in government and the media.
PN – Concur!
Damn, I liked the greenzone the first time I saw it when I was a kid, until I just read “writing leftwing fantasies like the Green Zone. Now looking back I realize what it was realy about 🙁
We had Marines medevac’ed out of country due to chemical warheads that were found in a stockpile outside of Fallujah in 2006. I tell people this and normally get told I am a liar, that there were no WMD in Iraq. Tell that to my three Marines that are now medically discharged due to exposure to mustard gas.
@26 They won’t believe you because it’s easier to keep their preconceived judgements, than admit (even to themselves) that they were wrong. They probably justify their beliefs after you tell them facts by somehow thinking to themselves that anyone in the Military is brainwashed. Only someone like Smedley Butler knows what’s really going on, because it fits their preconceived notions.
Heaven forbid anyone read facts, and change their mind……