Nagging questions about the war in Iraq - (piercing article; intelligently written!)

Nagging questions about the Iraq war remain unanswered. Both advocates and opponents have failed to address a range of issues even when they seemingly could be used to bolster their respective positions. Until and unless we obtain answers to some of the questions presented here it will be difficult to fully trust the judgment of either side in this debate.

Administration advocates for regime change in Iraq have failed to make their best case. Their response to the charge of no WMD found in Iraq is weak, and consequently has allowed the opponents to further charge that the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans in order to justify an unnecessary war.

Libya is one such example. After Colonel Khaddaffi relinquished his WMD programs the U.S. moved large amounts of weapons material from Libya to secure storage inside the U.S. It was reported that Saddam Hussein had sponsored WMD programs in Libya together with some of his scientists also located there. It was also reported that Libya originally claimed the secret work being carried out under a huge bombproof mountain was for manufacturing pharmaceuticals. It remains a puzzle why the Bush administration has consistently failed to tell us what was discovered in Libya and to cite this as a legitimate example of an ongoing Iraqi-sponsored WMD program.

There is also the Syrian question. Multiple reports described a convoy of trucks moving materials at night from Iraq to neighboring Syria shortly prior to the start of the war. Sources such as David Kay, the former head of the coalition's hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and others such as John Loftus, former U. S. Justice Department prosecutor, and the Washington Times reported on these transport projects, including specific storage locations in the Bekka Valley where these materials were buried along with special military protection. Before the war President Bush warned Syria against receiving any WMD from Iraq.

Surprisingly the Bush administration has been inexplicably silent on this matter since that time. There is understandable speculation that the Russians were involved and, along with Saddam Hussein, preferred to have any evidence of WMD removed, along with any possible evidence of their involvement. It remains a mystery as to why there is no western and U.N.-sponsored demand to inspect what was trucked out of Iraq and buried in the Bekka Valley.

For years Saddam Hussein played elaborate cat and mouse games to foil the U.N. weapons inspectors. If he had nothing to hide, do we then believe he did this deliberately to provoke America and its allies to finally lose patience and attack while assuming he was hiding WMD? Opponents of the war have a special obligation to explain what Saddam was hiding and why he blocked U.N. inspections.

Opponents of the war have failed to offer their own long-term response to dealing with Saddam Hussein. Simply standing still indefinitely would not have been a satisfactory answer. It would have allowed Saddam to defy over a dozen U.N. resolutions demanding freedom on arms inspection, which in turn would have allowed other nations also to flout international arms controls. It would have allowed him to further brutalize his own population with impunity, which is a direct challenge to the cause of human rights around the world. It would have allowed more time for him to research and develop WMD, either inside Iraq or subcontracted to other countries such as Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, etc. It also would have allowed more time for the U.N.'s oil-for-food scandal to persist in which Saddam bought the support of Russia, France, Germany and others while blaming America for his deliberate failure to properly feed and care for his own people. If war was not the answer what credible alternative was put forward by the war's opponents, along with what timetable?

The failure to properly answer these questions regarding Iraq can make it more difficult to deal with the threat from a nuclear Iran. Some of the opponents of the Iraq war are transferring their skepticism on U.S. action against Iraq to skepticism on any U.S. action against Iran. Decisions on Iran should be based purely on facts about Iran, but politics may cause opponents of George Bush to exploit the Iraq war to block needed action on Iran.

Opponents of the war also cite the fierce and ongoing insurgency that is taking a heavy toll on American forces and American resources and citing this as more evidence that the war was a mistake. But we also know that many of the insurgents come from, and receive support from, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, among others. The obvious question is why the U.S. is not squeezing these countries so they will reign in their support which is costing American lives and destabilizing Iraq.

Another mystery is Egypt. The U.S. taxpayer has provided some $50 billion in aid to Egypt over the past 30 years. Today Egypt has a military with strong offensive capability although facing no enemy. While Egypt continues to incite hatred for America and Israel they contribute nothing toward our effort in Iraq. As a well-armed Arab country with huge and available forces why are they exempt from aiding our anti-insurgency efforts? They can easily spare many thousands of ground troops to relieve the task now borne by American forces. Neither supporters nor opponents of the Iraq war have addressed this question.

We cannot arrive at the best decisions as long as so many important questions remain unanswered and even unasked.

Here's an article with details of Russian involvement:

Operation Sarindar, from KGB defector

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=10111

"As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit." I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third World countries, which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.

The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's "war-mongering" whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.

Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.

The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired"generals: Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcoming war—Saddam's Katyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.

The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war — the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.

Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 — when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its "extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.

Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with UN inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs, anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq—ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure," which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another "material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).

It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price."

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