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Politics : Moderate Forum

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From: Suma	5/1/2005 12:48:38 PM
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Puncturing Another Weapons Myth The New York Times \| Editorial Saturday 30 April 2005 The last refuge of those who continue to insist that Saddam Hussein must have had weapons of mass destruction was virtually eliminated by the chief weapons inspector this week. Not willing to accept the unpalatable truth that the search for WMD in Iraq had come up empty, die-hard supporters of the war had clung to the possibility that Mr. Hussein might have shipped his weapons off to Syria to avoid their capture. Never mind that American military leaders said that he could not have pulled that off during the war, when his regime was collapsing too fast to salvage much of anything, and that reconnaissance craft had seen no major arms shipments at the borders. Perhaps the wily dictator had spirited off the weapons before the war began. The final report of the Iraq Survey Group, headed by Charles Duelfer, has now declared any mass transfer of illicit weapons improbable. That judgment came in a 92-page addendum that was released this week to tie up loose ends from the comprehensive no-weapons-found report issued by the investigators last fall. The investigators acknowledged that they had been unable to pursue reports that a Syrian officer had suggested collaborating with Iraq on WMD, but they said that all the Iraqi scientists interviewed had denied any knowledge of weapons' being secreted in Syria. The team deemed it "unlikely" that any official transfer of WMD to Syria had taken place but could not rule out the possibility that limited amounts of material had been transferred unofficially. That's too slim a reed to save the die-hards. The new report provides a salutary reminder that the sanctions and weapons inspections imposed by the much-maligned United Nations had already reduced Iraq's weapons programs to impotence before the war was launched to eliminate them. Too bad John Bolton, the administration's nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations, is likely to continue underestimating the U.N.'s potential and to repeat old errors of hyping weapons estimates. In a recent Times article, Douglas Jehl reported that Mr. Bolton repeatedly clashed with intelligence officials in 2002 and 2003 because they thought he was stretching the evidence as he sought to deliver public warnings about Syria's pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Syria is clearly a bad actor that shipped military and civilian material to Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions. But policy makers need to keep the threat in perspective lest they be sucked in again by their own exaggerations. ------- Jump to today's TO Features:

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