Why has the administration refused to make this case?
Because we would have to go to the places in Siria where they buried the WMD, and we want to finish Iraq first. As long as the WMD are buried, they aren't going to hurt anyone.
Because it then would be compelled to go into Syria and get them....... This is bad?
Mike
"Why has the administration refused to make this case?"
My guess is that 'somebody' helped move them and outing the WHO would open another can of worms, and our liberals would demand a public display of "INTEL". Could well be that making the case would endanger real "covert" entities.
Head up: Every time I ask that question, a segment of people come along to tell me how wrong I am to even ask. It's considered "negative" to even ask this simple question.
For the lurkers, some other WMD information to digest:
Charles Duelfer said he can't rule out the possibility that Iraq's WMD were secretly shipped to Syria before 3/03 citing sufficient credible evidence that the WMD were moved.
Duelfer made the findings in an addendum to his final report last year.
It was well known that Syria was a major conduit for obtaining UN-banned materials for Iraq. Several senior US officials have seen intelligence which shows it is likely that Iraq's WMD went to Syria.
Retired Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, the dputy commander of CentCom, wrote in his book "Inside CentCom" that intelligence reports pointed to WMD movement into Syria.
John Shaw, then the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told The Times in October 2004 that Russian special forces and intelligence troops worked with Saddam's intel services to move WMD to Syria.
Before changing his mind again (ala John Kerry), David Kay, the UN weapons inspector, told Tom Brokaw in July 2003 that based on millions of pages of internal Iraqi government documents recovered from Saddam's regime, he was convinced that Iraq had WMD which were taken out of the country before the war. Among the documents which have been translated:
- corresponsence between various Iraqi organizations giving instructions on how to hide WMD;
- chemical agent purchase orders dated 12/01;
- WMD protection suits and instructions on how to hide chemicals;
- ricin research; and
- a memo from the Iraqi Intelligence Service on how to hid information from a UN inspection team.
Bill Clinton, perhaps remembering his own rhetoric about the danger that Iraq's WMD program posed to not just the region but the United States, said in a July 2003 interview on Larry Kind that "it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for" in Iraq.
In June 2004, UNMOVIC's executive Chairman, Demetrius Perricos, detailed the exprt of thousands of tons of missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and formentors for WMD warheads and the discovery of some of these items, with UN inspection tags still on them, as far away as Turkey, Holland and Jordan.
"According to a July 10, 2004, Washington Post article on the Senate Intelligence Committee findings about Wilson's investigatory trip to Niger, Africa, unanimously agreed by all committee senators, including Democrats, “The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.
And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address.
”In March, 2003, when U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq, 500 tons of yellow cake uranium was found at the Iraqi nuclear research center of al-Tuwaitha. This included 1.8 tons of partly enriched uranium. On June 23, 2004, the U.S. military, working with the U.S. Department of Energy removed this material to the US where is held at an unnamed Department of Energy facility."
Best I can figure is they're not ready to march against Syria yet. Maybe they're flipping a coin between Syria and Iran.
Because the Dems can make it look bad on the President.
They could say we allowed WMD's to cross from Iraq to Syria and we did nothing to stop them. They could say the President didn't show enough strength to stop the flow of WMD's. Remember the convoys going to Syria?
Maybe I'm naiive or underinformed, but I haven't heard anyone ask where the physical eveidence of the destruction of the WMDs is. The UN certified that he had large stockpiles during the Clinton administration; if they were destroyed, where were they destroyed? Shouldn't there be some physical evidence of same? Where's the broken gun?
"Why has the administration refused to make this case?"
I suspect Syria has been penciled into the Middle East re-arrangment schedule for sometime after the 2006 US elections.
B. Getting all the data and links before closing the loop.
It would mean going into Syria and I think the administration is just waiting for Syria to give US a good reason to go into their country that doesn't overtly focus on this type of reason.
Until it becomes expedient to actually move against Syria militarily, it is a moot point that cannot be satisfactorally proved. Even knowing it's true is of no benefit with the current climate in the MSM and commie Dims, who will howl that it just ain't so, then set about claiming we planted the WMD in Syria, even if we do go in and find them.
Because he doesn't want Syria to know how much we know? And because he's not ready to go public with what we're doing about it?
If you didn't have an absolute fix on where they were located, would you want every terrorist in the world to know where they are? Better they think there were none, then to let them know they are out there somewhere.
How do we difine WMD today? It is 1,000 or more killed by a single impact or 500 or 100 or 1 million?
Because our Military and our CIC know much more about Saddam's WMD program (or lack thereof of any up and running WMD program) then does this Israeli -
The WMD equation was merely one reason out of more then a dozen on why we needed to move on removing Saddam from power. The World (and America) are safer because of our actions.
However with that said the case still remains that Saddam did not posses the up and running WMD program we suspected to find at the start of OIF (in 2003) - Nor does it appear that he had an updated and operational WMD program going during the late 90's into 2003 like we suspected he did (like the World suspected he did).
But regardless he was a threat and needed to be removed post 9-11 (al Qeade did not posses WMDs on Sept 11th....but would anyone seriously try and deny that they weren't a threat??).
President Bush probably wants to avoid giving Liberals the ability to claim that he's making a case for war against Syria.
All accusations of the President's "rush" to war are known to be false by those of us who remember how long it actually it took. If the President decides to do something about Syria or Iran, it won't be an invasion, as much as he probably thinks it might be necessary in the long run. The President is far more likely to solidify Iraq's standing in the Middle East, shift focus back to Afghanistan's mountainous regions, and continue to revamp the intelligence and financial aspects of the war on terror.
Recall that one criticism of going to war with Iraq over WMDs was that such an action would scatter them. Well, apparently, that did happen - recall that an al Qaeda attach on Annan, Jordan involving chemical weapons was thwardted and then fell off the radar screen.
So the Bush Admin, IMO, isn't interested in highlighting the fact that the WMDs got away. And the Dems are far too invested in the "Bush Lied" political attack to go down that road either. And when both parties are interested in a dog remaining asleep, no one wakes it.
"Why has the administration refused to make this case?"
No kidding. That ought to be a serious concern. Not that there were none, but where did they go and who's going to use them?
I'll never understand this "no wmd" mantra.
Boy, that's been my question since before the 9/11 commission. The most that I can figure out is that President Bush's much-vaunted political advisors screwed this up royally.
They seem to have a single strategy, namely what they call rope-a-dope. In this strategy, they let the opposition exspend all its energy and use all of their arguments before fighting back and blowing them out of the water.
Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't seem to work where the opposition argument gets traction, and the Keystone Kops working in the White House never seemed to have developed a Plan B.
In my opinion, they lost control when they let the CIA raise a hew and cry about President Bush's attribution, in his own State of the Union Address, of the Niger story to British intelligence (his statement, that British intelligence believes that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger, was and remains accurate -- regardless of the CIA's own position on Iraq's efforts in Niger).
It seems to me that the President ought to have final say over his own statements in the State of the Union address, and when he surrendered this he showed a kind of Presidential weakness not seen since Jimmy Carter's malaise.