MM notes this New York Sun story about Saddam Hussein’s former second in command of the air force. He’s claiming that Hussein smuggled WMDs into Syria aboard modified passenger planes.
It wouldn’t surprise me if what he says is true. We haven’t found any WMDs in Iraq, this is true. My concern, though, has always been that we know Saddam had the things, but we don’t know what happened to them. Many anti-war folks talk about the lack of WMDs in Iraq as if they never existed, but that’s just not the case. We found them after the Persian Gulf War, we found more we didn’t know about when Saddam’s son-in-law snitched on him, we’re certain he had more when he threw out the inspectors in the late 90’s, and nearly all the world’s intelligence agencies think he was producing them while he wasn’t being monitored. So they existed. But in the time since the Iraq invasion, I’ve seen nothing that tells us what happened to them. We have no evidence Saddam destroyed them, which would have been the best outcome. So if they weren’t destroyed and weren’t found in conventional warehouses or storage facilities, that leaves two other options: either they’re unconventionally stored or they were shipped out of the country prior to our heavily advertised invasion. For the former, they could be buried out in the desert somewhere. The Iraqis buried entire jet fighters in the desert, so it wouldn’t have been difficult to do the same for much smaller munitions or barrels. And for the latter, they could have been transferred to Syria for safekeeping until Saddam repelled the Yanks. This is the worst-case scenario because it means the WMDs still exist and they belong to a bad regime.
So until we have solid evidence that the WMDs were destroyed or are buried somewhere, it’s best to assume the worst. We’ve got to figure out what happened to them and if we think they’re in Syria, then we should step up the pressure on the Assads.
Also read this post by Rick Moran who has similar concerns to mine and who notes other reports that are collectively worrisome.