New Evidence on WMD's
Jay Bryant (archive)
December 12, 2003 | Print | Send
A former Lt. Colonel in the Iraqi Army, who apparently had been a spy for years and is now working for the Iraqi Governing Council, says that Iraq did too have weapons of mass destruction. He says he saw them, that they were designed to be launched by hand-held rockets, and were to be used only on the personal orders of Saddam Hussein.
The Colonel, whose name is al-Dabbagh, who made the revelations in an interview with a reporter from the Telegraph of London, also believes he was probably the source of a controversial claim by British intelligence in September 2002 that Iraq had WMD's that could be launched within 45 minutes. Actually, he thinks it was closer to half an hour.
Al-Dabbagh apparently doesn't know whether the warheads were chemical or biological in nature, and he doesn't know what has happened to them, although he speculates that the Fedayeen probably has hidden them somewhere in Iraq.
At least one former Iraqi General has said he doubts the story, and that he knows nothing of the al-Dabbagh's claim. But given that al-Dabbagh has been receiving death threats since his interview with the Telegraph became known, it's not hard to come up with at least one reason the dissenting General might dissent.
Or al-Dabbagh may be full of it. Or he may be sincere and wrong. Telegraph reporter Con Coughlin can't think of any reason the Colonel would lie, and says al- Dabbagh was reluctant to give the interview. I can think of several reasons he might lie, although none strike me as being as compelling as the reasons the unnamed General might lie.
So if the Iraqis had WMD's, why didn't they use them? Here is what Coughlin reports: "The only reason that these weapons were not used, said Col al-Dabbagh, was because the bulk of the Iraqi army did not want to fight for Saddam. 'The West should thank God that the Iraqi army decided not to fight,' he said."
The Telegraph further speculates that, "The American advance was so rapid that the Iraqis could only deploy chemical weapons around Baghdad: that would have killed the Iraqi civilian population - who did not have masks - but not the US soldiers, who did. Even Iraqi officers loyal to Saddam Hussein balked at that."
Left unanswered at this point is this key question: did Saddam give the required personal order to use the weapons, which were then disobeyed, or did the order never reach the front lines?
In Britain, there is an official inquiry underway, probing the government's war decision. Headed by Lord Hutton, the inquiry was prompted by the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly. Kelly killed himself in the wake of the feud between the Blair Government and the BBC. Al-Dabbagh has offered to testify before the inquiry, and it will be interesting to see if Hutton takes him up on it.
The inevitable murkiness of humint is thus displayed once again. For every spy who says X, there is another who says Y. Erring on the side of caution is an obvious choice for those who must make policy in such situation, but what constitutes caution? The US and British must have presumed there was reason to believe the WMD's existed, or they would not have gone to the trouble of equipping the troops with gas masks. That's caution on one level, but would it have been a greater caution to avoid war altogether and allow Hans Blix and the UN to continue their attempts to get Saddam to fess up about the weapons?
It is now possible to understand why Saddam could not permit Blix the kind of access that would have given a firm and final answer to the question about WMD's. Consider, for example, Blix's request to search the Presidential Palaces. Apparently there were no WMD's there (even if they were somewhere else), but we now know what was there: torture chambers, the accoutrements of a lavish and decadent lifestyle, billions of US dollars in cash. Saddam needed to hide these every bit as much as the weaponry.
So in the end, al-Dabbagh's interview provides new evidence that there were WMD's: evidence, yes, but not conclusive proof. Still, it is a canard to believe that Bush and Blair went to war knowing that there were no WMD's, and lied to their constituencies in order to build support for their decision. Saddam had had WMD's, had used WMD's and refused to prove – as the UN demanded – that he had destroyed them.
The war was about regime change, which in turn was about two things: freeing the Iraqi people from a despicable, murderous dictatorship and striking an offensive blow in the war on terrorism. These goals have been accomplished. Repeat, have been accomplished. Bringing stability and prosperity to Iraq and winning the war on terrorism remain, but the first requirement for their success is resolve. By focusing on the red herring of WMD's, and ignoring or attempting to discredit evidence such as that provided by al-Dabbagh (as they have also done with regard to evidence of Iraqi/al-Qaeda links), politicians and media establishments who have other agendas threaten that resolve and thus expose their lack of commitment to stability in the middle east and peace in the world.
Veteran GOP media consultant Jay Bryant’s regular columns are available at www.theoptimate.com, and his commentaries may be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
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