JOSHUA FRANK: A War in Search of a Justification

War supporters still looking for a smoking gun

by Joshua Frank -- World News Trust

On March 20, the twits at FrontPageMag.com interviewed Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot, who stated without a doubt that Saddam shipped WMD off to Syria on the eve of the Iraq invasion. McInerney was referring to documents he believes prove that Saddam was hiding his horrible weapons. Of the 600 documents that have been released to the public thus far, none, I repeat none, say that Saddam shipped off his WMD to secret hiding spots.

It is clear that McInerney, a Fox News (sic) commentator, and the FrontPage conspiracy nuts are desperate to find evidence that WMD existed in Iraq prior to the invasion three years ago. They are also hoping to uncover ties between bin Laden and Saddam. Many of the documents they hope will uncover these claims contain forgeries, rumors, and disinformation. In short, they aren't the most reliable sources.

Nonetheless, here's an example of the hearsay propped up by McInerney:

"Yes, to three locations in Syria and one in Lebanon in the September-December 2002 time frame. This information was provided by Jack Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security. He charged that Saddam's stockpiles of WMD were moved by a Russian Spetznatz team headed by Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, who came to Iraq in December 2002 to supervise the final cleanup."

I suppose if Jack Shaw says it's true, it must be. Right. Here's a guy who in December 2002 released a report of Saddam's alleged crimes, but as Noam Chomsky noted at the time:

"It was drawn almost entirely from the period of firm U.S.-UK support, a fact overlooked with the usual display of moral integrity. The timing and quality of the dossier raised many questions, but those aside, Straw failed to provide an explanation for his very recent conversion to skepticism about Saddam Hussein's good character and behavior."


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http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=2879

I argued for impeachment and war crimes trials on the website of The Nation this week. The most serious defense of Bush's pre-war misstatements came from someone pushing that conspiracy theory. Serious, but still pathetic.

For the discussion at The Nation, please click here.

we were invading? Exactly when else would he have used them on us?

If he hid them in Syria instead, he definitely wasn't a threat--he was retarded.

As I said on that post -- repeating my arguments against war supporters on DU forums three years ago -- if I were the president of a nation under the imminent threat of invasion and I had an arsenal of biochemical weapons, I would get ready to use them. I think Saddam would have done exactly the same thing, and the ideal time for him to strike would have been when invading forces were massed on the Kuwaiti frontier just before the balloon went up. That is when I would have hit them with everything I had. I think Saddam did exactly that. He fired four pathetic missiles, three of which landed harmlessly in the sea and the fourth was a dud.

The "theory" -- it barely deserves the name -- is being promoted in a book by Georges Sada, a former air force official in Saddam's regime. I haven't read the book and have very little interest in it. It seems to be hawked on Fox News and not taken seriously anywhere else. A poster at The Nation says:

According to Sada, Saddam didn't use his WMDs for (possibly) several reasons: 1) They could not be made ready in time 2) They would not stop the inevitable and Saddam would then have been caught in a lie (that he had WMDs after all) or 3) Saddam thought he would be left in power as after Gulf War I and could retrieve the WMDs from Syria later.

Saddam knew that the invasion was coming and would have been foolish not to get his weapons ready, if he had them. He had over a year to prepare for war after September 11, when the Bush regime started saying "Saddam" in the same sentence with "Osama" to get them ready. The argument that he had no time is preposterous.

It would not have bothered Saddam to have been caught in a lie any more than it bothered him to gas Kurds. Like Bush and the neocons, Saddam believes that leaders have a right to lie to get what they want, only he didn't have a tradition of a Constitution based on the concept of the rule of law and open government to destroy in the process.

The third point is absurd. The stated purpose of Bush's plan was "regime change." Saddam knew that if war came he would be forced from power by the conquering army.

The idea of transferring one's entire arsenal of weapons of mass destruction to a third party is simply counter-intuitive. It is absurd to believe that Saddam or any one else would send the weapons to Syria -- governed by an unstable regime with an incompetent spoiled brat as its titular president -- and then, when the danger had passed, asked to get them back. What guarantees would he have had that he would get them back? I can just see some grinning Syrian commander leaning on a missile armed with anthrax telling Saddam, "You want them back? Come and get them, sucker."

What Saddam wanted to do, above all else, was survive with his hold on power in tact. He knew that he couldn't win a war against the US, even if had such weapons, and that the stated purpose of the war was to remove him from power. Therefore, he had to avoid war and the only way he could do that was to invite inspectors in and convince the world that he had no weapons. He did just that.

Bush wanted something more than demonstrating that Saddam had no weapons. Had he allowed the inspections process to run its course, he would have come out smelling like a rose. He could have claimed, "We didn't know whether or not Saddam had weapons, and now we know he does not. See, our strategy worked." Who would have argued with that?

that he knew exactly where the WMDs were - and specified and area near Tikrit... :eyes: