The Price of Delay

It has been common knowledge for at least the past two years that the six-month delay the Bush Administration gifted to Saddam Hussein by going through the motion of the UN weapons inspections regime instead of just invading Iraq in the summer of 2002 was put to good use by the cheeto-loving megalomaniac evacuating his WMD stockpiles to Syria for safekeeping against his anticipated return to power after the Americans had been "Vietnamized."

Last week a former Iraqi Air Force general provided further confirmation:

Best source confirms the intelligence of Iraqi wmd moved to Syria in 2002 provided by Iraqi Air Force general Sada in his new book, Saddam's Secrets.

Writing in [last Thurs]day's New York Sun, editor Ira Stoll, after a meeting with Sada at the Sun's offices, summarizes Sada's evidence. In June 2002, Chemical Ali supervised the transfer of wmd chemical stocks from Baghdad to Damascus by loading the cargo onto Iraqi Airlines 747s with seats stripped out. There were fifty six flights in all, with the cover story that Iraq was aiding Syria after disastrous flooding. Name of Syrian general receiving wmd not confirmed by best source, pending.

This is consistent with intelligence developed over many years that Iraq developed a multiple layered CBRN program.

Sada, fearing for his life, and the lives of his sources the pilots who flew some of the aircraft, also makes mention of civilian truck convoys transfering wmd to Syaria prior to the war. This connects with multiple reports from IDF general officers, active and retired, that convoys were observed travelling from Baghdad to Damascus and then onto Lebanon in late 2002.

This also connects with developing story of DOCEX, the program to translate and analyze two million documents captured in Baghdad that contain the pattern and practice of terror and wmd in Iraq 1999-2002.

This also connects to report of a CD (about to surface in the news) containing the voices of Saddam Hussein and staff planning to conceal wmd from UN and others, recorded in staff meetings from 1988 to late 2000.

I never have much understood why the Bushies have always been so reluctant to cite such evidence against the endless slanders of "misleading the country into war" the the DisLoyal Opposition hurled at them after no WMD arsenal was found. The only explanation I've conceived of is that if they did so, the Democrats would immediately start accusing the White House of plotting an invasion of Syria, either generating more bad PR they figured they didn't need or perhaps complicating the case-making for an invasion (or blowing the cover off any covert ops we have going on inside Syria). And since they survived all the "BUSH LIED!!!!!" crud to get re-elected anyway, why wake up sleeping dogs nobody knows about.

But with this further development in the story today, another, less savory possibility comes to mind:

A former senior military advisor to Saddam Hussein is warning that the chemical weapons used by top al-Qaida terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi in a foiled 2004 plot to attack Amman, Jordan were the same weapons Saddam Hussein transported to Syria before the U.S. invasion.

General Georges Sada offered the stunning revelation Saturday while explaining why he didn't decide to go public about Saddam's hidden WMD stockpile until recently.

"As a general, you see, we should keep our secrets," General Sada told WABC Radio's Monica Crowley. But when news broke of the foiled WMD attack on Amman, he changed his mind.

"I understood that the terrorists were going to make an explosion in Amman in Jordan . . . . and they were targeting the prime minister of Jordan, the intelligence [headquarters] of Jordan, and maybe the American embassy in Jordan - and they were going to use the same chemical weapons which we had in Iraq," he told WABC.

This actually isn't news per se, at least not to anybody who pays close attention to this subject, though as you might suspect it hasn't exactly received a lot of Extreme Media coverage. But it does suggest an additional reason why the Bush Administration hasn't been very eager to draw attention to the pre-war evacuation of Saddam's WMDs. If they got distributed to terrorist networks, most especially al Qaeda, that would throw a very uncomfortable spotlight back upon the decision to indulge the "multilateralist" crowd in the hopes of gaining international approval for toppling Saddam Hussein that was never, ever going to be forthcoming, and how it facilitated the Iraqi dictator's WMD falling into the hands of Islamist berserkers.

Sure, it would require the Left to perform yet another logic backflip (akin to the "Bush didn't connect the dots on 9/11"/Bush is the new Big Brother" media contortion) by leaping from excoriating Operation Iraqi Freedom to flaying the President alive for not bypassing Turtle Bay altogether and invading six months earlier, but "any port in a storm" has been their SOP for years now. The point is the Bushies would have no answer for this criticism, and that really could erode Dubya's credibility on the war and national security in general.

Hey, the Dems are rattling phony sabres against Iran while slamming Bush for following their own appeasenik advice in allowing the Euros to diplodiddle themselves endlessly while the mullahs nuclearize themselves beyond any hope of Saddam-like removal - an even more egregious repetition of that same mistake. Is a CYA suspicion really such a stretch to harbor?