If Saddam had no WMD's, then why did he act like he did have them? He says now that it was to deter Iran, but that's not the whole story, as Christopher S. Carson explains as he examines "What Duelfer Missed", at FPM.
...a great deal of information in Duelfer’s own Report contradicts his tidy model of a disarmed-but-coyly-pretending dictator. Take the little matter of the secret biological laboratories hidden throughout Baghdad and under the control of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). UNSCOM had spent years roaming Iraq and never so much as heard a whiff about them. Hans Blix and his successor agency, UNMOVIC, found Iraq in non-compliance in 2002 without stumbling over a single white lab coat. These labs were unknown to any intelligence agency in the world until after the Iraq War, when ISG uncovered their existence. They were all in egregious violation of the UN resolutions on disclosure and disarmament.These labs deserve more than a mention because the real danger from Saddam’s Iraq was never really a large-scale use of chemical or biological weapons on a battlefield. American troops could defend against this kind of attack. It was the danger that Saddam would arm terrorists with these weapons, and use them against select American civilian targets.
And why wouldn’t Saddam? His men trained foreign al-Qaeda and other terrorists at Salman Pak in aircraft hijacking, helped to bankroll al-Qaeda and its affiliates, kept Zarqawi, Abu Nidal, and Abu Abbas as house pets, tried to kill former President Bush, tried to blow up Radio Free Europe, and apparently sent an active colonel in the Fedayeen Saddam to baby-sit the 9-11 hijackers in the 2000 Malaysia planning summit, for starters.
Carson includes lots of good information from the Kay and Duelfer Reports that was not widely reported in the media when the reports came out. It should be required reading for the "Bush lied" crowd.
Posted by dan at June 21, 2005 04:15 PM