WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION WERE SADDAM'S GREATEST DEFENSE
Get well soon, Ken, so you can come back and ride herd on your "loonies" - Doc
Georgie Anne Geyer
June 27, 2003
UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
THE UNITED NATIONS -- When I was in Iraq during the country's bitter war with Iran in 1984, the Iraqi military took a handful of us correspondents out to the nightmarish front lines.
It was there that I saw and learned things that may add to our understanding of the weapons of mass destruction that seem to have suddenly disappeared.
It was a day in April in that ugly and ominous desert east of Basra in the south, and as we traveled by small bus 60 miles toward the border, we saw huge numbers of the Iraqi army literally dug into the earth. Sand trenches crossed and crisscrossed one another; enormous sand walls, so wide at the top that tanks rumbled up and down them, were everywhere; and behind these strange, primitive defenses, the Iraqis had released water from dams and waterways, flooding specific territories, thus prohibiting enemy movements.
As I looked at those military creations of war -- and then talked extensively to well-informed foreign military advisers in Baghdad -- what I saw writ unmistakably into the Iraqi psychology was "defense, defense, defense." They never really advanced on the offensive against Iran, never even used their air force.
Even the Kuwait war of 1991 could not be seen as offensive (although to the world, it was) because the Iraqis had long claimed it -- and especially, its oil.
Now our president tells us that we can wear the victor's laurels in Iraq, but in truth the situation has become bewitchingly complicated. Different voices, all informed but confused, set the stage for new speculation on Saddam Hussein's mysterious machinations.
Here in New York, for instance, prominent Swedish U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix has been speaking out, repeatedly putting forth the idea that the Iraqis truly had destroyed the weapons in the early 1990s -- but "kept the ability to produce them. We were perplexed," he said on television, "that he put up all the defensive measures and then did not have any. We have to give some thought to why they did what they did. Apparently they did not mind a little calculated ambiguity."
This week, American Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, in line to become head of the Central Command, expressed a slightly different type of bewilderment. Speaking to the Congress, the general acceded that the U.S. military had expected the Iraqis to use chemical warheads against the American troops.
"I believed that if we had interrupted the movement of chemical weapons from the depots to the guns," he said, "we would have found them in the depots. But we've looked in the depots, and they're not there."
Then this week came a "big story," broken by CNN, which was ostensibly to offer proof that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
A prominent Iraqi scientist, Mahdi Obeidi, after American troops raided his home, showed CNN where he had been told at least 10 years ago by the government to bury centrifuge materials that could be used sometime in the future to build nuclear weapons and to reconstitute a nuclear program.
And -- get this -- they were buried under his rose bushes! If this "great threat" to America does not remind you a little of the gang that couldn't shoot straight or your Aunt Minnie burying her jewelry to keep it safe, I suggest you think about it that way for a moment.
Let's consider, based on more and more quite believable evidence, some other scenarios to account for the mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction.
What if it were really "weapons of mass deception," a part-fraud perpetrated by the devious Saddam as one more defense against the outside world, whose conquerors Iraq has feared (rightly so, actually) for all its 5,000 years of violent history?
We know that Stalinist Saddam did get chemical and biological weapons from East Germany at the height of the Cold War, but in fact all the evidence gathered so far (witness the rose garden findings) are of capacity, not of intention to employ immediately. The capacity to murder without the attempted act certainly wouldn't hold up in any American court of law.
But American officials are confused even by the idea that Saddam could have been putting one over on them in his ferocious attempt to keep foreign invaders out by advertising horrendous weapons he would use.
Ah, we Americans, so literal, so innocent! Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld said this week, considering the statements of Hans Blix that Saddam actually might have disarmed after the 1991 Gulf War: "If he had in fact disarmed, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose by cooperating with the U.N., yet he continued to lie and to obstruct the U.N. inspectors."
Poor Pentagon thinkers. Apparently they never read anything about Iraqi history. In fact, Saddam had everything to lose by admitting he had disarmed -- he would have lost the fear of those around him.
There is a prominent concept among the Shiites of both Iran and Iraq. It is called "dissimulation," and it means lying and falsifying to defend the faith against the foreign enemy. Some people ought to look it up.
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