Saddam's "Nonexistent" WMD Now Belong To Islamic State
"The
people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at
the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons
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The New York Times boasts admittedly great reportorial skill, but the Old Gray Lady has a lot of trouble connecting the dots of what she uncovers.
A massive eight-part front-page extravaganza on Iraqi chemical weapons on Tuesday reported that during the Iraq War, U.S. forces found "roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs," sickening numerous soldiers, who were then ordered not to talk.
But in a story dripping in supposed irony, the Times never puts two and two together: If stumbling upon Saddam Hussein's buried WMD made our troops ill, what could he have done had he been allowed to recover what he buried? After all, 5,000 Kurds and thousands of Iranian troops were gassed by Saddam in the mid-1980s during the Iran-Iraq War.
The Times also never notices a particularly weighty gorilla in the room: At the Persian Gulf War's conclusion back in 1991, United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 required Iraq to "unconditionally accept the destruction, removal or rendering harmless" of all its chemical and biological weaponry.
In 1997, of course, Saddam began closing down WMD inspections by the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, accusing it of being a U.S. spy agency.
The so-called "rush to war" with Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that critics of Bush's invasion talk about, charging it was all based on misinformation, actually took place over some 12 years, during which the civilized world patiently stood by amidst 17 U.N. resolutions against Saddam, all of which were based on widely accepted fact and Saddam's documented mischief.
It wasn't George W. Bush or neocon icon Paul Wolfowitz who described the "kind of threat Iraq poses now" as being "a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists." President Bill Clinton did — in 1998.
Nor did Bush say, "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability and his nuclear program," and, "if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." That was then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in 2002.
Bush didn't say in 1998: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology ... and he has made a mockery of the weapons-inspection process." Rep. Nancy Pelosi did.
No wonder more than 50 countries supported the U.S. liberation of Iraq in 2003, dwarfing the international coalition that went to war to reverse Saddam's invasion of Kuwait more than a decade earlier.
When the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Res. 1441, "a final opportunity" for Saddam to disarm in November 2002, all it wanted to lift sanctions and avoid war was overflights and unannounced inspections. Saddam refused, knowing WMD would be found.
Now that the chemical weapons that weren't really there are in the hands of the Islamic State monster that has emerged after Obama's premature military withdrawal from Iraq, how many of the Democrats quoted above wish their president had not dismantled the victory Bush left for him?
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