Russian Van Lines

We've been monitoring the falderol about the Saddam audio tapes over the past week. I personally haven't had much to say about it because there hasn't been what could reasonably be called a "smoking gun" that has yet surfaced. Just the same business of Saddam having WMDs, trying to develop nukes, and playing shell games with the UN's Inspector Clouseaus. Not to minimize any of that, as it still flies in the face of the Left's caustically dishonest "Bush Lied!!!" meme, but it has a distinct "been there, done that" flavor.

This revelation, though, is something else altogether:

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Virginia. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said. [emphasis added]

As Neo said after his first kung-fu upload, "Whoa!" The involvement of our supposed friend Vladimir Putin in rendering such clandestine assistance to Saddam Hussein on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion - which, strategically speaking has had a definite chilling affect upon the Bush Administration's prosecution of the GWOT, bringing it to a virtual halt for all intents and purposes (i.e. leaving the terror masters in Damascus and Tehran intact) - changes the whole equation, or ought to. As Moscow's continued assistance to Iran's nuclear weapons program should have made crystal clear, the Russian Federation sees its interests, whether as appeasement to its own Islamists and/or the road back to superpower status, as lying with the terror states of the Middle East, not any true alignment with America and Europe. Indeed, Islamic Fundamentalism is an ideal vehicle for hostile powers like Russia and Red China to make trouble for the West and tie us down in an intractible part of the world while they make inroads elsewhere, including in our backyard. And doing so in such clandestine fashion is precisely what we should expect from a former KGB official.

Ken Timmerman provides the timeline:

*In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

*Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free."

*Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or "emergency exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice. In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003 "two Russian ships set sail from the (Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean," where Shaw believes they "deep-sixed" additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel.

*The Russian "clean-up" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."

*Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on October 30, 2004, that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003.

*The two Russian generals "had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20 times in the preceding five to six years," Shaw revealed. U.S. intelligence knew "the identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz units, their dates of entry and exit in Iraq, and the fact that the effort (to clean up Iraq's WMD stockpiles) with a planning conference in Baku from which they flew to Baghdad."

*The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu, "laid out the plans for the Sarandar clean-up effort so that Shoigu could leave after the keynote speech for Baghdad to orchestrate the planning for the disposal of the WMD."

*Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz operatives "were now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU garb," Shaw said. "The Russian denial of my revelations in late October 2004 included the statement that "only Russian civilians remained in Baghdad." That was the "only true statement" the Russians made, Shaw ironized. [emphasis added]

Note that emphasized passage. If U.S. intelligence knew what the Russians were doing, why in the world did they sit on it instead of raising hell with Moscow (which had already stabbed us in the back on the Security Council resolution to explicitly endorse the use of force against Iraq), to the extent of doing all they could to smear and discredit Mr. Shaw and his intel sources?

Retired Air Force Lieutenant-General Thomas McInerney has an answer that you probably won't like very much:

"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs," he told NewsMax, "the Administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information that would make them look bad."

As they deserve to be. "The Administration needed the Russians, ChiComms, and French" - the very same regimes that armed Saddam to the teeth and the former two of which are directly and indirectly assisting Iran's quest for nukes - to prevent that very outcome? The same Administration that was so bold and courageous in liberating Iraq quasi-"unilaterally"? That's a level of irony that ought to be accompanied by a complimentary dose of Dramamine and a coupon for a free spinal replacement.

Iranian nukes cannot be stopped by politics or diplomacy. They can only be averted by the use of American military power. That the Bushies are so evidently unwilling to use that military power, after having used it to such great and devastating effect just next door, explains much of their utter and perplexing disinterest in the millions of Saddammite documents that continue to gather dust in U.S. military warehouses. It seems that Dubya and his coterie have developed an almost neurotic and definitely masochistic interest in perpetuating the incompetence and sedition of their own "intelligence community" in order to spare the image of enemy powers whose assistance they will never obtain to prevent an outcome those enemies actively seek.

I guess that's one more argument in favor of "neoconservatism" - it doesn't give you a headache.