Iraq's WMDs Find Us
By Michael Reagan
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 21, 2004
It's beginning to look as if we don't have to find the missing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) after all - they appear to have found us.
What is Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and the antiwar crowd going to say now that this 155 mm shell -- with four liters of deadly Sarin gas, enough to kill thousands of people -- landed on our feet in Baghdad?
The shell was specifically designed to be a "binary chemical projectile," having two chambers that keep the chemical components inside separate until they are fired by an artillery piece. In other words it was not just an ordinary artillery round filled with Sarin gas.
Naturally this bombshell of a development in the WMD controversy was all but ignored by the liberal mass media. Had John Kerry been President and this same thing had happened, you can bet that it would have been all over the front pages, and the network news broadcasts would be telling the world that President Kerry had found the WMDs. Hallelujah!
But with George Bush in the White House it's just another ho-hum news story.
As the House Armed Services Committee has observed, the news regarding sarin and mustard gas discoveries in Iraq serve to remind us that Saddam Hussein did have a vigorous WMDs program. And there isn't a shred of evidence that he ever destroyed them. So where did they go?
Consider this: On April 17, Jordan's King Abdullah said that captured vehicles containing deadly chemical weapons and poison gas -- part of an al-Qaeda bomb plot -- came from Syria, which former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay named last year as a likely repository for Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Last year Kay told Congress that U.S. satellite surveillance showed substantial vehicular traffic going from Iraq to Syria just prior to the U.S. attack on March 19, 2003. While cautioning that investigators couldn't be sure the cargo contained WMDs, one of his top advisers described the evidence as "unquestionable."
This latest discovery in Jordan was all but ignored by the liberal media. They'd rather concentrate on trying to keep the prisoner abuse scandal alive in the hopes it will damage the President's chances of re-election.
I was talking about Iraq with Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, author of the new book The End Game, on my radio show the other day. We discussed the fact that we have already uncovered 1 million metric tons of ammunition in Iraq. Now to put that in perspective, the U.S. has 1.5 million metric tons. And where is the news story about that startling fact? Little Iraq had two-thirds the amount of ammo possessed by the mighty U.S.?
According to the House Armed Services Committee, "By Hussein's own admission, Iraq possessed thousands of chemical weapons and tons of chemical weapon agents:
Some 4,000 tons of ingredients to produce poison gas, including sarin.
550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas.
At least 3.9 tons of VX, a deadly nerve gas, and 805 tons of precursor ingredients for the production of more VX.
8,500 liters of anthrax.
500 bombs fitted with parachutes for the purpose of delivering poison gas or germ payloads.
107,500 casings for chemical weapons.
At least 157 aerial bombs filled with germ agents.
25 missile warheads containing germ agents (anthrax, aflatoxin, and botulinum).
"In each case, Hussein claimed to have destroyed the weapons and materials of mass destruction in accordance with U.N. resolutions. But the regime, which kept tens of thousands of pages of detailed information about its illegal weapons of mass destruction programs, offered no proof of their destruction?-not a piece of paper convincingly documenting the alleged destruction, not a dismantlement site, not a single smashed chemical warfare bomb."
It's no wonder Sen. Kerry recently speculated that WMDs may soon be found, but I don't think he believed that while we were looking they'd find us.
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