It appears that hunches from 2003 that Saddam moved his WMD to Syria are turning out to be true: Iraq's #2 airforce commander says Iraqi WMD were moved to Syria in converted civilian jumbo jets disguised as relief supplies after a Syrian dam collapse in June, 2002.
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."
Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria." ...
The flights - 56 in total, Mr. Sada said - attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.
"Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming," Mr. Sada said. "They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians."
I'm interested as to why American intelligence agencies haven't leaked this sort of information during the recent deluge. Maybe they don't know about it? It doesn't seem like it would be hard to verify information involving 56 plane flights, there must be hundreds of people who know what happened, if anything.
Anyway, as I've said all along, the WMD angle was only one component of why we deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether or not there turns out to have been WMD, toppling Saddam's fascist regime was necessary for bringing real reform to the rest of the Middle East.
(HT: Clayton Cramer and Michelle Malkin.)
I've always been troubled by the vaguely racist assumptions that the Left makes about Saddam and WMDs. They seem to imagine that he would just leave big piles of chemical and biological weapons lying around, as if he was too stupid to hide them or move them.
I make the opposite assumptions. Saddam may be evil incarnate, but he's also very smart, and he had a lot of time to figure out how to handle an American invasion. If he had WMDs, then of course he hid them or moved them. I would have been astonished if he had done anything else. You don't come to be dictator over millions of people by missing opportunities to hurt your enemies.
It would be good to note these stories but treat them with caution. We're in no position to know whether this is just self-promotion by an author with a book to sell or it's real. I talked about Mihai Pacepa's assertion that no WMD would be found way back in 2003, noting his credentials but not asserting unequivocally that he was right. Guard your reputation.
The simplest explaination for why the intel community wouldn't leak this even if they knew about it would be that they wouldn't want to the Syrians to know that we know. It would do two bad things: it would expose the assets we used to monitor them (technical or human) and it would tip them off to be more secretive when they moved them again. If they think they are hidden now, they don't have to be as cunning if they move them again (since we presumably aren't watching where they are now).
TML: I thought my post was clear that there may not be anything to these assertions. Most likely we'll never know for sure.