WMD Watch - I'm not

WMD Watch - I'm not normally one given to heaping rhetorical abuse on my opponents. If you like that sort of thing for its own gleeful sake on a regular basis, you need to read here and here.

That being said, anyone who reads the Kay report on Iraqi WMDs and surmises that "There's No There There" is a deluded fool who either flunked history, or learned it from people with an agenda not far to the right of Saddam's.

Sullivan has several posts on the subject of the Kay report in today's Dish. Scroll down, read 'em all.

Key points? According to Sullivan:

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• A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

• A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

• Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

• New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
• Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).
• A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
• Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.
• Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
• Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

Money quote?:

One of the crazy premises of the "Where Are They?" crowd is that we would walk into that huge country and find large piles of Acme bombs with anthrax in them. That's not what a WMD program is about; and never was. Saddam was careful. He had to hide from the U.N. and he had to find ways, over more than a decade, to maintain a WMD program as best he could, ready to reactivate whenever the climate altered in his favor. Everything points to such a strategy and to such weapons being maintained. [emphasis mine - mb]

Anyone (on the left, especially) that thinks Saddam's only worthwhile goal would have been mounds of missiles, bunkers full of bombs, piles of poison gas all stockpiled and ready to go as of March 2003 is myopic and deluded.

Posted by Mitch at October 3, 2003 06:28 AM