UN Confirms: WMDs Smuggled Out of Iraq
editorial by Rod D. Martin
In a report which might alternately be termed "stunning" or "terrifying",
United Nations weapons inspectors confirmed last week not merely that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but that he smuggled them out of
his country, before, during and after the war.
Late last week, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC)
briefed the Security Council on Saddam's lightning-fast dismantling of
missile and WMD sites before and during the war. UNMOVIC executive chairman
Demetrius Perricos detailed not only the export of thousands of tons of
missile components, nuclear reactor vessels and fermenters for chemical and
biological warheads, but also the discovery of many (but not most) of these
items -- with UN inspection tags still on them -- as far afield as Jordan,
Turkey and even Holland.
Notably absent from that list is Iraq's western neighbor Syria, ruled by its
own Baath Party just like Saddam's and closed to even the thought of an
UNMOVIC inspection. Israeli intelligence has been reporting the large-scale
smuggling of Saddam's WMD program across the Syrian border since at least
two months before the war. Syria has long been the world's foremost
state-sponsor of terrorism.
Perricos highlighted the proliferation danger to the Security Council, as
well he should: UNMOVIC has no idea where most of the WMD material is today,
just that it exists and it's gone; and anything in Syria is likely to be in
Jerusalem or New York tomorrow.
This is the biggest news story of 2004 so far. Yet you haven't heard about
it, have you?
You probably haven't heard about Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin either
-- a socialist and no friend of America. Addressing a group of 700
university researchers and business leaders in Montreal last month, Martin
stated bluntly that terrorists have acquired WMDs from Saddam. "The fact is
that there is now, we know well, a proliferation of nuclear weapons, and
that many weapons that Saddam Hussein had, we don't know where they are. [T]errorists
have access to all of them," the Canadian premier warned.
The tip of this terrorist sword was scarcely deflected on April 26th, when
Jordanian intelligence broke up an al Qaeda conspiracy to detonate a large
chemical device in the capital city of Amman. Directed by al Qaeda terrorist
leader Abu al-Zarqawi -- the same man who personally beheaded American
Nicholas Berg in Iraq last month -- the plotters sought to use a massive
explosion to spread a "toxic cloud", meant to wipe out the U.S. embassy, the
Jordanian prime minister's office, the Jordanian intelligence headquarters,
and at least 20,000 civilians (by contrast, only 3,000 died on 9/11). Over
twenty tons of chemical weapons were seized from the conspirators, who were
just days away from carrying out their plot.
One wonders where CNN and USA Today think twenty tons of nerve gas and Sarin
came from: Chemical Weapons-Mart? Yet their coverage, like most major media
outlets, mentioned not a word about Saddam's smuggled WMDs, which --
according to liberal dogma --"don't exist."
Even though the UN says they do exist, now spread around the world.
It's not just the UN. Bill Clinton says they exist, even after the war: in a
July 2003 interview with Larry King, the ex-president uncharacteristically
defended George Bush, saying "it is incontestable that on the day I left
office, there [was]...a substantial amount of biological and chemical
material unaccounted for" in Iraq. Every intelligence agency in the world --
French, British, German, Russian, Czech, you name it -- agreed before the
war; Jordanian intelligence can certainly confirm their opinion today.
So what's the deal? Why the relentless pretence that "Bush lied" when even
the UN and Bill Clinton say he didn't? Why the absolute silence about
"inconvenient" parts of various UN reports, such as the discovery of
chemical and biological weapons plans, recipes and equipment; of bio-weapons
agents in an Iraqi scientist's house; of a prison lab for testing bio
weapons on humans; of complexes for manufacturing fuel for prohibited
long-range missiles; of artillery rounds containing enough sarin to kill
thousands of people, of similar shells containing mustard gas, two (but far
from the only) of which were used in a terrorist attack against U.S. forces
just weeks ago?
America cannot afford the answer to this "why": that many on the left
consider George W. Bush's defeat more urgent than al Qaeda's, his political
death more essential than the possible physical death of millions of
Americans.
The character
of our foreign enemies has never been in doubt. The character of the enemy
within -- from Dan Rather to Michael Moore -- has never been clearer. And
the stakes are the highest they've ever been.
[NOTE: article
author, Rod D. Martin, is Founder and Chairman of Vanguard PAC.]