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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (141772)	7/29/2004 2:18:32 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Israeli intelligence defends its own assessment of Saddam's WMDs: From Baghdad to Damascus By URI DAN The head of Israeli military intelligence Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze'evi Farkash still believes that on the eve of the war against Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator did have "a residual capability of weapons of mass destruction." The professional opinion of this experienced intelligence officer is important in the context of the mocking criticism being directed against Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush over the issue of WMDs. I am told that even this "residual capability" was enough to kill thousands of people. In a recent conversation, Ze'evi Farkash told me that according to intelligence information possessed by Israel, Saddam's arsenal still contained several bombs, shells, or warheads for Scud missiles – weapons of mass destruction. According to Ze'evi Farkash, Saddam had prepared Russian-made Tu-16 and Su-24 long-range aircraft in order to deliver these bombs. His French-made Mirage aircraft also made long-range training flights of about 1,000 kilometers, thus bringing Israeli targets into bombing range. SO WHERE did these weapons go? Mystery continues to surround the contents of Iraqi shipments to Syria in September, October, and November 2002, shortly before the US and Britain went to war against Saddam's regime. It may well be that these secret shipments from Iraq to Syria contained components related to WMD as originally revealed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The importance of these shipments was so great that they were discussed in detail by Saddam and Syrian President Bashar Assad. It is this intelligence information that was enough to cause the government to announce, on the eve of the war, a state of alert and order its citizens to prepare their gas masks. No responsible government could have ignored the risk of the "residual capability" of WMD held by Saddam. It was sufficient that he had in the past dropped a small number of mustard-gas bombs on Halabcha to slaughter thousands of innocent Kurds there. The question arises, To what extent did Israeli military intelligence persuade the intelligence communities of Britain and the US to believe that Saddam possessed an arsenal of WMD? After all, professional anti-Semites (who are certainly not lacking in the US or in London and Paris) are spreading the lie that President Bush went to war to defend Israel against the danger of weapons of this kind. Did Israel mislead the US into making war with Iraq? In fact, a senior Israeli military intelligence officer told me that the US and British intelligence services independently reached the conclusion that Saddam had WMD without reference to the Israeli information and situation estimates. "We asked the American and British experts to show us the material on which they had based their estimates, but they refused to do so. Consequently, we continued to insist that our information about Saddam's residual capability of WMD was accurate," the Israeli source explained. "Anyway," he continued, "if Saddam Hussein had remained in power, he would have exploited the first opportunity that arose in order to re-equip his arsenal of WMD, support acts of terror, and threaten the peace of the entire region." My hunch is that the mystery of Syria's involvement in this episode will one day be solved. The writer is the Mideast correspondent of The New York Post. jpost.com