Posted on 06/15/2003 2:07:08 AM PDT by FairOpinion
SAN ANTONIO -- It wasn't long ago that no one disagreed that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Not congressional Republicans and Democrats, who overwhelmingly voted last October to use military force against Iraq because it "had large stockpiles of chemical weapons and a large-scale biological weapons program and an advanced nuclear weapons development program."
Not the U.N. Security Council, which unanimously passed Resolution 1441 in November recognizing Iraq's "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
Not President Clinton, who told the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pentagon staff in 1998 that Iraq had "an offensive biological warfare capability -- notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs."
And certainly not the Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians who had been victims of Saddam's chemical weapons in the past.
The only questions that remained by the end of 2002 were: What had Saddam done with those weapons after he threw U.N. inspectors out of Iraq in 1998; and how much time was the international community willing to give a new inspections regime created under Resolution 1441?
Yet now, some people are claiming to be wiser than Solomon, wiser than Congress, wiser than 15 U.N. ambassadors, wiser than Clinton, George W. Bush and Hans Blix in knowing that those weapons of mass destruction never existed.
It says something about the ideological motivations and allegiances of such people that after only two months of searches, they are ready to declare conclusively that the weapons issue was a propaganda tool. Yet after four months of U.N. inspections, they demanded more time to search for weapons -- weapons they now claim never existed.
None of which would detract from the legitimacy of the war in Iraq. Saddam was required not only to destroy his weapons of mass destruction, but to do so in a way that could be verified by the United Nations.
Resolution 687, adopted by the Security Council on April 3, 1991, clearly called for Iraq to "unconditionally accept the destruction, removal or rendering harmless, under international supervision" of all weapons of mass destruction.
In the unlikely event that Saddam destroyed his weapons on the honor system while no one was looking, he was still flaunting the Security Council and inviting the most severe consequences.
Then there's the untidy fact of those mass graves that keep popping up across the Iraqi landscape, filled with men, women and children who were slaughtered by the Baathist regime. The moral case for the removal of Hussein may not have been the primary motive the administration enunciated at the United Nations, but to many people with a sense of humanity it was the most compelling.
The failure to discover significant evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction at this point does begin to raise some difficult issues.
Yes, it's possible that Bush and his advisers cherry-picked intelligence reports to create a threat assessment that was unrealistic. If so, they were the same intelligence reports that guided the Clinton administration and our European allies.
Which points to the possibility of a second, monumental failure of U.S. intelligence, in addition to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Whether Saddam destroyed his weapons and we didn't know it, passed those weapons on to other countries or terrorist groups or hid them so skillfully that we can't find them, each possibility augurs poorly for the efficacy of our intelligence-gathering capabilities in a dangerous world.
We haven't yet found Saddam or his two evil spawn, who collectively comprised the greatest Iraqi weapon of mass destruction. Yet no sane person would argue that they never existed or that their crimes were manufactured by an American administration hellbent on war.
Let's give the U.S.-led military inspectors at least as much time and leeway as U.N. inspectors before drawing conclusions, while at the same time beginning to ask important questions about the integrity of the U.S. intelligence community.
Jonathan Gurwitz is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. E-mail: jmgur@swbell.net
"It says something about the ideological motivations and allegiances of such people that after only two months of searches, they are ready to declare conclusively that the weapons issue was a propaganda tool. Yet after four months of U.N. inspections, they demanded more time to search for weapons -- weapons they now claim never existed."
Truth be told, I tend to forget about subjects I have covered, after a few days or weeks have passed, and often don't follow up with fresh information- but this is such a hot talking point that I will try to keep it updated.
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