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FROM MILITARY.COM FORUM

August 19, 2005


Did President Bush deliberately mislead the American public about the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq? A lot of people think he did, but I don't happen to be one of them.

I get five or six emails a week on this subject, as well as a fair number of postings in my Military.com discussion forum. I try to answer each of those emails and postings as honestly and thoroughly as I can. My goal is not so much to change the other person's point of view, as to help him or her understand how I arrived at my own position regarding WMDs in Iraq. To that end, I generally include links to the resources and documents that have been instrumental in shaping my opinion.

Having revealed the basis for my own opinions, I often ask them to share the rationale for their beliefs. I also ask them to site the documents, evidence, or testimonies that helped them formulate their position.

The responses vary wildly. Some people break off the dialogue immediately, as though examining the thought-process behind an opinion is entirely out of bounds. A few shift instantly from conversation mode to name calling. (One of these accused me of being so tightly wrapped in the flag that I can't see anything.) And some -- a small minority -- actually provide links to the resources they consider important.

I am continually astounded by the fact that very few of the President's critics seem to have actually examined the evidence regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Thousands of pages of unclassified (or declassified) documents on the subject have been released by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the CIA, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and a score of other organizations. The findings of the UN weapons inspectors, including UNSCOM and UNMOVIC reports, are available online. The deliberations and findings of the UN Security Council are just a mouse-click away, but a lot of people are too busy hating the President to review the data.

I've read as many of the reports as I can get my hands on, with particular attention to the evidence provided before the onset of military action in Iraq. In my opinion, given the information available at the time, there was every reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had an ongoing chemical/biological warfare program even as the weapons inspection teams were carrying out their UN mandate.

In the eyes of many Bush-detractors, anything that supports the position of the current administration qualifies as propaganda, and can be automatically disregarded. But many of the reports come from sources outside of the American government, and a lot of the documents predate the Bush administration. A significant number originate from sources that are overtly critical of the United States and/or the President, making it fairly difficult to dismiss their contents as Bush administration propaganda.

I'm going to quote from several of those reports. I apologize in advance, because some of what you're about to read is a little on the dry side. (Apparently, politicians are even more in love with their own words than most writers are.) So parts of this will be a bit long winded. But it's worth reading. There's a lot of important information to be gleaned -- information that might just answer the question as to whether or not the President lied about the threat of WMDs in Iraq.

Let's start with a fact that many people have apparently forgotten: Saddam Hussein's possession and use of WMDs is an established fact. We know with utter certainty that he had them, and that he used them.




The UN website contains eyewitness testimonies from people who were present when WMDs were used by Iraqi forces. This is directly from a United Nations Commission on Human Rights report on the subject:

A young man, who was a mere boy at the time, survived the Halabcha bombings in March 1988. He described to the Special Rapporteur the horror that followed the bombing of his native town with chemical weapons such as mustard gas, and the continuing effects on his health and that of hundreds of others who also survived the onslaught. Thousands of people died, including 25 members of his family, and thousands more are still suffering today from heart disease, breathing problems and eye allergies.

That same report goes on to say:

During his consultations with a Kurdish delegation in Amman in December 2003, the Special Rapporteur heard evidence on issues such as the Anfal campaign, executions and mass graves. There now exists documentary evidence inculpating the mastermind and chief executioner of these crimes, Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, alias ‘Chemical Ali,' and proves the existence, at the highest governmental level, of the criminal intent to mercilessly exterminate the Kurds and implant people of mainly Arab origin in their homes and villages, in a process that amounted to genocide.

A BBC News article from March of 2002 references both the massacre and the use of WMDs:

Iraqi aircraft shelled Halabja with chemical weapons on 16 March 1988, in an attack which left 5,000 dead and 7,000 injured or with long-term illnesses.
Saddam Hussein's infamous Anfal campaign is incredibly well documented, and there are literally thousands of eyewitnesses. Even Aljazeera (not exactly a pro-Bush organization) concedes that Hussein's regime conducted massive chemical weapons attacks on the Kurdish town of Halabja, resulting in thousands of deaths.

Of course, the Anfal campaign is classified as old news. Nearly fifteen years had elapsed between those massacres and the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As far as I know, there's not statute of limitations on mass murder, but Saddam Hussein's record as a homicidal despot is not the current point of contention.
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The issue is the likelihood of WMDs in Iraq in the weeks prior to U.S. military action in that country. From that perspective, fifteen years is a very very long time. More than enough time for Hussein's regime to destroy its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. I raise the issue, not as proof of a continuing WMD threat in Iraq, but to point out that Saddam Hussein has demonstrated both the willingness and capability to kill large numbers of people using Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Let's look at a more recent document. Here are a few lines from UNSCOM letter S/1999/94. Please note that the emphasis is mine, not that of the weapons inspectors.

“Iraq's disclosure statements have never been complete; contrary to the requirement that destruction be conducted under international supervision, Iraq undertook extensive, unilateral and secret destruction of large quantities of proscribed weapons and items; it also pursued a practice of concealment of proscribed items, including weapons, and a cover up of its activities in contravention of Council resolutions.”
That's from an official report by the weapons inspectors. Here's another piece from the same report:

“The Commission has been very substantially misled by Iraq both in terms of its understanding of Iraq's proscribed weapons programmes and the continuation of prohibited activities, even under the Commission's monitoring."
And another quote, also from the same report:

“In response to the Commission's requests for relevant documents, Iraq has repeatedly claimed that they no longer exist or cannot be located, a claim which often has been shown to be false, either because inspection activities have in fact located precisely such documents or because Iraq has reversed its stated position and then produced relevant documents. In one aspect related to the destruction of BW warheads, the Commission, after consulting a group of international experts, assessed that Iraq's declaration that 15 warheads had been destroyed simultaneously conflicted with physical evidence collected at the declared location of their unilateral destruction. This finding indicated that not all BW warheads had been destroyed at the same time as claimed by Iraq and that Iraq had retained some BW warheads...”
In October of 2002, just five months before the start of the Iraq war, the CIA's official 2002 summary of Iraq's WMD program had this to say:

“More than 10 years after the Gulf war, gaps in Iraqi accounting and current production capabilities strongly suggest that Iraq maintains a stockpile of chemical agents, probably VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard. Iraq has not accounted for 15,000 artillery rockets that in the past were its preferred means for delivering nerve agents, nor has it accounted for about 550 artillery shells filled with mustard agent.”
The CIA report also referenced Iraqi Air Force documents which indicate that Saddam Hussein's military deliberately overstated the number of chemical bombs expended during the Iran-Iraq war by at least 6,000. In other words, 6,000 chemical warfare bombs that had been reported to the UN as destroyed were -- in fact -- totally unaccounted for. Those 6,000 bombs remain unaccounted for to this day.

Experts from UN weapons inspection teams assessed that Baghdad's declarations vastly understated the production of biological agents. According to the estimates of the inspectors, Iraq actually produced two-to-four times the amount of agent that it acknowledged producing, including Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) and botulinum toxin.

Just six weeks prior to the Iraq war, Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix made his report to the UN Security Council on the progress of the inspection effort in Iraq. Mr. Blix spoke hopefully, and highlighted several recent advances in the inspection process. He also stated that many proscribed weapons were not accounted for. He specifically mentioned 1,000 tons of chemical agent that the Iraqi government could not (or would not) account for. He was careful to avoid jumping to the conclusion that the agents were missing. He left room for the possibility of some harmless error that might account for the loss of 1,000 tons of chemical weapons.

Mr. Blix's report also addressed the fact that Iraq was continuing to manufacture components of the al-Samud II missile system, in violation of UN Resolution 687 and the monitoring plan adopted by Resolution 715. He referenced the discovery of 380 missile engines, designed for use in the prohibited weapons system, and pointed out that Iraq had imported the engines in violation of the UN ban.

I could easily fill up sixty more pages with similar citations, but I've already subjected you to enough dry bureaucratic writing. Instead, I'll settle for a quick recap of what we've already seen. At the onset of U.S. military action in Iraq, 6,000 chemical warfare bombs were unaccounted for, along with over 500 chemical artillery shells, more that 15,000 artillery rockets designed for use with chemical weapons, 1,000 tons of an unidentified chemical warfare agent, and at least 15 biological warfare warheads. These are from only a handful of the available reports. There are many many more like them.

Do these documents constitute the proverbial smoking gun? Perhaps not. Are they incontrovertible proof of an ongoing WMD program in Iraq? No. But they are (and were) extremely powerful indications of Iraq's capabilities and intentions.

Bear in mind that I've presented only a fraction of the material available, and that a great deal of the remainder points in the same direction. Also remember that we are speaking of a regime known to have possessed and employed chemical weapons, as well as a frequently-demonstrated intent to deceive UN inspection teams.

All of this raises a simple question: Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction? I can't answer that. At the moment, no one who can answer that question has come forward. Maybe the assessments were wrong. Maybe Saddam really had destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. If so, I have to wonder why he was continuing to play games with the inspection teams. I also have to wonder why he was actively importing banned weapons systems less than two months prior to the start of the war.

I don't think we can be certain yet that the WMDs are gone. Iraq is a large country, and we've only searched a portion of it. We know a lot of things are still hidden under the ground, because we're still stumbling across mass graves.

But I must admit that it's possible that our intelligence estimates were wrong. That doesn't make the President a liar. It means that our intelligence people read the signs wrong. I've read the documents, and I came to pretty much the same conclusions as the intelligence community. If it turns out that their assessment was wrong, then mine was wrong as well. That may turn out to be the case. But there's an ocean of difference between a faulty assessment, made in good conscience, and a deliberate deception.

As I've said, I don't kid myself into thinking that I can sway the minds of people who believe that the President lied about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Instead, I invite you to review the evidence yourself. Not the sound bytes and cable news abstracts of the evidence, but the actual documents available prior to March 19, 2003. They're available to the public at no charge. Read them. Think about them. Try to mentally place them in the context of what we knew before the first U.S. tank rolled across the border into Iraq. And then make up your own mind about whether or not the President lied.


About the Author



Jeff Edwards is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer, and an Anti-Submarine Warfare Specialist. He is currently working as a civilian expert consultant to the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Command, the Navy's think tank for high-tech undersea warfare. His naval career spanned more than two decades and half the globe -- from chasing Soviet nuclear attack submarines during the Cold War, to launching cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf.

He puts his extensive experience as a Surface Warfare specialist to work in his new novel, TORPEDO. In a plot that could easily be ripped from today's headlines, TORPEDO combines an accident at a nuclear power plant, an illegal arms deal, and a biological warfare attack, to ignite a crisis that could draw Western Europe, the Middle East, and the United States into all-out war. TORPEDO mixes the elements of a classic sea chase novel with state-of-the-art technology to create a cutting-edge Surface Warfare Thriller.

TORPEDO is the winner of the 2005 Admiral Nimitz Award for Outstanding Naval Fiction.




© 2005 Jeff Edwards. All opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.

[dusty]

Thanks for the posting.
Mailing this out to all my 'Bush lied' aquaintences. Most folks will notice I didn't say 'friends'.

Dusty
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Left and Wrong are the opposite of Right!

[MrJapan]