So excuse me if I refuse to join the new conventional wisdom that says Saddam was toothless when we invaded. We found too much damning evidence of WMD programs after we conquered Saddam's regime even with the big scrub the Iraqis carried out (with French or Russian help to hide their tracks?) for me to believe Saddam's regime was innocent. We saw too much in the inspections as Tierney describes in the article.I just don't believe every intelligence agency was wrong on Iraq prior to the war.
This groupthink that Saddam had no WMD in March 2003 replaces the conventional wisdom that Saddam's scientists were all bluffing a psychopathic mass murderer by pretending to have WMD programs; which itself was a replacement for the theory that Saddam was purely bluffing all of us. And this, of course, replaces the conventional wisdom held by both parties for nearly a decade that Saddam had WMD in defiance of UNSC resolutions demanding he disarm.
On the heels of an Israeli general's comments on weapons going to Syria, there is (via The Corner) a new book out by a former Saddam air force commander:
The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.
The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.
The general speaks only of chemical weapons, which adds credibility since chemical weapons were the only WMD I was positive Saddam had (since he had them in the past and used them without a doubt). If the general had spun tales of nuclear warheads being spirited away, we could disregard his story. So perhaps there are Iraqi WMD in Syria. Or maybe buried inside Iraq still. Or both, I suppose. If Saddam paid Syria to hide his WMD, after the experience with Iran keeping all the planes that Saddam sent in 1991, I doubt Saddam would have given up everything for safekeeping inside Syria.
Give an enemy time and they just might use it to their advantage, I always say (and frankly, it annoys people that I always say that). I think Iraq used the time we gave them in our long-telegraphed punch in March 2003 to hide their chemical weapons and scrub evidence of their stockpiles and programs.
Conventional Wisdom 5.0 is yet to be released. It will be a great improvement over the current version.
