Saddam's WMDs

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2007-11-20 03:30pm

Shattering Conventional Wisdom About Saddam's WMD's

We live in an age of documents. There are no more secrets, only deferred disclosures. Saddam Hussein's secret documents are measured by the shelf-mile and stored inside a secure but dusty facility near U.S. Central Command Headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and in several subsidiary sites. Armed guards protect the unread dossiers. Three shifts of two hundred translators each work around the clock. Perhaps 5% of these captured documents have been studied so far, but their contents are about to shatter much of the conventional wisdom concerning Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

The absolutists on either side of the WMD debate will be more than a bit chagrinned at the disclosures. The documents show a much more complex history than previously suspected. The "Bush lied, people died" chorus has insisted that Saddam had no WMD whatsoever after 1991 - and thus that WMD was no good reason for the war. The Neocon diehards insist that, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the treasure-trove is still out there somewhere, buried under the sand dunes of Iraq.[1] Each side is more than a little bit wrong about Saddam's WMD, and each side is only a little bit right about what happened to it.

The gist of the new evidence is this: roughly one quarter of Saddam's WMD was destroyed under UN pressure during the early to mid 1990's. Saddam sold approximately another quarter of his weapons stockpile to his Arab neighbors during the mid to late 1990's. The Russians insisted on removing another quarter in the last few months before the war. The last remaining WMD, the contents of Saddam's nuclear weapons labs, were still inside Iraq on the day when the coalition forces arrived in 2003, but were stolen from under the Americans' noses and sent to Syria. Syria is one of eight countries in the world that never signed a treaty banning WMD, and now is the storehouse for much of what remains of Saddam's WMD Empire. This was the target of the recent Israeli air strike.

Much more in the article, it is quite long.

Kanastrous · Post by **Kanastrous** » 2007-11-20 03:56pm

I'm mildly surprised to see people still identifying themselves as Assyrians.

Wonder if there are still self-described Babylonians, Jebusites, Canaanites, Amalekites, etc out there...

Fingolfin_Noldor · Post by **Fingolfin_Noldor** » 2007-11-20 04:14pm

Kanastrous wrote:I'm mildly surprised to see people still identifying themselves as Assyrians.

Wonder if there are still self-described Babylonians, Jebusites, Canaanites, Amalekites, etc out there...

The Palestinians, if I recall, claim descent from Canaanites to bolster their claim on the land.

Quite frankly, the groups still exist, though right now with all the intermarrying, there's probably pieces and parts of the blood in everyone there.

Kanastrous · Post by **Kanastrous** » 2007-11-20 04:32pm

The article is interesting.

I don't know how seriously to take it, but it's still interesting.

Balrog · Post by **Balrog** » 2007-11-20 05:11pm

Indeed, but has this be confirmed by other sources?

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2007-11-20 05:40pm

Sounds like a big steaming pile of bullshit to me. It’s true that hoards of documents have not even been glanced at, but the idea of Iraq exporting bulk quantities of chemical weapons in secret is pretty absurd. No one would actually want to buy the stuff, especially not Syria which has its own arsenal already and old chemical weapons are extremely dangerous to transport. The idea that the Israelis would strike at this secret stockpile, and somehow only hit one single building in the process pretty much demonstrates on its own that the author is suffering from crap bloat.

Elfdart · Post by **Elfdart** » 2007-11-20 05:50pm

Sea Skimmer wrote:Sounds like a big steaming pile of bullshit to me. It’s true that hoards of documents have not even been glanced at, but the idea of Iraq exporting bulk quantities of chemical weapons in secret is pretty absurd. No one would actually want to buy the stuff, especially not Syria which has its own arsenal already and old chemical weapons are extremely dangerous to transport. The idea that the Israelis would strike at this secret stockpile, and somehow only hit one single building in the process pretty much demonstrates on its own that the author is suffering from crap bloat.

Another problem with the conspiracy theory about Saddam smuggling the weapons out of Iraq is the implication that the US armed forces were somehow involved. After all, it would be pretty hard for all that stuff to be sent to Syria without some of it being spotted by satellites, aircraft, or troops on the ground.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2007-11-20 05:51pm

Awwww... Too bad the results of UNMOVIC and IAEA inspections pre-war and post-war as well as the utter lack of material evidence for this alleged arsenal show this article to be total horseshit.

Which is pretty much what a lot of us right here figured out at the time of the war.

Kanastrous · Post by **Kanastrous** » 2007-11-20 06:12pm

Sea Skimmer wrote:The idea that the Israelis would strike at this secret stockpile, and somehow only hit one single building in the process pretty much demonstrates on its own that the author is suffering from crap bloat.

The Israelis managed to do that when they hit Osirak. PGMs+good airmanship...

...but a lot of it does seem kind of suspect.