Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Criminal Naivet�

Rich Galen

Friday October 08, 2004

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From the New York Times. Wednesday, October 6, 2004, reported by Douglas Jehl on the 1,500 page report of Charles Duefler on the state of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq:

"Mr. Duelfer said in the report that Iraq had made a conscious effort to maintain the knowledge base necessary to restart an illicit weapons program. He said that Iraq had essentially put its biological program "on the shelf" after its last production facility, Al Hakam, was destroyed by United Nations inspectors in 1996, and could have begun to produce biological [weapons] in as little as a month if it had restarted its weapons program in 2003."

The Duelfer report has been waved by John Kerry and his ward Sparky Edwards as proof of the Administration's misleading the world regarding the availability of WMD in Iraq prior to the step off of hostilities in 2003.

In his Congressional testimony on Thursday, Mr. Duelfer said of the state of the WMD programs, "Most senior members of the [Hussein] regime and scientists assumed that the programs would begin in earnest when sanctions ended and sanction were eroding."

So, in order to believe that Saddam Hussein had no intention of ever producing biological, chemical, and/or nuclear weapons of mass destruction and was not a threat to the West you have to be willfully dim or guilty of criminal naivet�. Or both.

The report says that Saddam dismantled his WMD programs specifically to get the sanctions against him lifted. Those sanctions were beginning to break apart because his pals - notably France - wanted to appease him in order to gain favorable contracts with oil-rich Iraq.

While the sanctions were in place, the United Nations organized and administered the very excellent Oil-for-Food program so that the Saddam government could purchase - not just food - but all the other items necessary to keep the country going and the people fed.

Saddam, we now know, was skimming billions - that's BILLIONS - of dollars from Oil-for-Food. I can tell you that anyone who has traveled throughout Iraq knows the proper name should have been the Oil-for-Palaces program.

As we noted above, Saddam "had made a conscious effort to maintain the knowledge base necessary to restart an illicit weapons program," and money was not going to be a problem in building WMDs.

Saddam wanted to be seen as the next great Middle Eastern leader. In order to be a Great Leader he had to have the sanctions removed. Can't be a leader and have the US controlling two-thirds of the airspace over your country and the United Nations deciding how you can spend your money.

So the sanctions had to go away. The French were willing to be complicit in helping Saddam accomplish that and the Oil-for-Palaces money helped Saddam pay off the French.

And if the sanctions had been lifted Saddam would have been in the perfect position to provide the materials of destruction to any terrorist organization which came a'knocking looking for the goods thus cementing his position as the Great Middle Eastern Leader he so desired to be.

He would have gotten credit in the Arab Street for being the principal supplier for WMD used in the Jihad against the United States, while being able to stand before the United Nations denying knowledge of any attacks.

And the Jacques Chirac would have been right behind him.

America understands that Iraq is but one battleground in the worldwide war on terror, and by removing Iraq as a source of supply and support for terrorists the world is, indeed, safer and the removal of Saddam was the only proper course of action to protect our nation.

Or Saddam might well have "begun producing biological weapons in as little as a month."

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the NY Times article, a nice Mullfoto from Florence, and a Catchy Caption of the Day guaranteed to make you want to vote for Kerry/Edwards.

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