Iraq and WMD's Another Look by Dr. Lyle Rapacki

[adsanity id=15905 align=alignleft /]The following is an unedited briefing I believe is essential to the debate that continues even today whenever the subject of Iraq is introduced — Mychal Massie.

The Middle East continues to spin into crisis. Iran continues to move toward great influence in the Middle East, and can now lay claim to be in control of Ramadi, Fallujah, and other regions of Iraq, the very nation America freed from ISIS and brought into order, and a level of peace and calm the country had not ever known. Obama’s phenomenal combination of ignorance, incompetence, and spoken Islamic bias only adds to the mess. Yet, in spite of these factors, Democrats and their ideological cousins who make up the radical and socialist left still blame former President Bush claiming if he had not lied and went after chemical weapons allegedly stored in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, none of the calamities exploding in the Middle East would be occurring today. Once again the liberal mantra is Bush lied; that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction hidden by Saddam Hussein. Well…I received the below report from a U.S. Navy Captain (Ret.), and I thought you might like to read another side to the age-old charges.

The following report was published in the New York Times. The NYT is the last place I would have expected a report such as this. I don’t presume that the clandestine purchase of WMD’s will alter the opinions of any liberals who have made up their minds as to the nonexistence of such weapons, because this is what they intend to inscribe in the secondary school history books for the edification of the next generation of American citizens, and once entered, it etched in the minds of our youth to perpetuity, and truth obliterated in a sea of political correctness.

[adsanity id=8405 align=alignleft /]NYT: CIA bought, destroyed undeclared Iraqi chemical weapons demanded by UNPOSTED at 9:31 AM ON FEBRUARY 16, 2015 BY ED MORRISSEY. Share on Facebook 305481 SHARES The topic of WMD in Iraq has been a hot potato for more than two decades, ever since the end of the first Gulf War and the procession of 17 UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Saddam Hussein verifiably destroy them. Hussein ignored those demands and committed numerous violations of the 1991 cease-fire agreement that suspended the war. In 2003, the US went back to war in part over the issue of WMD, deposing Hussein but coming up empty on the accusations of chemical and biological weapons, which prompted the “Bush lied” arguments that have echoed ever since.

Occasionally, caches of chemical weapons have been found in Iraq, reviving the debate, but they have been weapons that had already been declared and transferred to UN control before the 2003 invasion. If the WMD existed in Iraq, what happened to it? Many suspected that it got transferred to Syria prior to the 2003 invasion, but the New York Times reports today that the CIA actually did find at least some of the suspected and undeclared caches of chemical weapons — and destroyed them:The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

In confidential declarations in the 1990s to the United Nations, Iraq gave shifting production numbers, up to 18,500. It also claimed to have destroyed its remaining stock before international inspectors arrived after the Persian Gulf war.

The handoffs varied in size, including one of more than 150 warheads. American ordnance disposal technicians promptly destroyed most of them by detonation, the officials said, but some were taken to Camp Slayer, by Baghdad’s airport, for further testing.This is the first time that there has been any media reporting on finds specific to the disputed munitions that Hussein refused to acknowledge. It sounds as though there were a large quantity of Borak rockets eventually procured, too, not just a few leftovers that might have been innocently overlooked by the previous dictatorship in Iraq. C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt also report that these were not the kind of exhausted and expired chemical weapons that the UN had been storing, but still potent enough to alarm the US when they were discovered.Why this was kept quiet was anyone’s guess, but the secret was tightly held. Perhaps the CIA and Pentagon wanted to keep it under wraps so that they could quietly buy as many of the weapons off the black market as they could, without tipping their hand to the insurgency. That might have been good strategy, but the Pentagon kept it so quiet that it never told veterans serving in Iraq or the VA physicians that treated them later about the possibility that they had contact with chemical weapons from any source. It seems unlikely that the insurgents didn’t get their hands on any of the Boraks — and it’s not entirely clear that the US got them all, either.This should recast the WMD debate from the 2003 invasion, but it probably won’t. At least so far, there’s no indication that the US found the new chemical- and biological-weapons programs that their faulty intelligence showed Saddam Hussein restarting between the two wars, and that will overshadow even a large number of undeclared saran-filled Borax in any attempt to show that the issue of WMD Intel was at least nuanced. On the other hand, we’ve waited almost a decade to find this out, so it’s impossible to say what else may have been discovered and not declared by the Pentagon and CIA during that period. It may be another decade before we can safely assume anything.[adsanity id=11817 align=alignleft /]