I don’t know that you could call me a voracious news reader; however, I do read a lot of news and today I stumbled on this gem from BBC News which talks about Saddam Hussein predicting terror attacks on America and Great Britian. The entire Iraq invasion has driven a wedge among the people of the United States. Nearly three years into the liberation/occupation, there are people either strongly for it, or strongly against it.
At one point in time I had played some devil’s advocate scenarios in my head. One of those ideas went something like this:
What if Saddam didn’t really know about the weapons programs allegedly taking place in Iraq? Maybe it was generals or others underneath him who were building these things up, keeping a buffer of safety between the programs and the dictator to keep him out of trouble. Perhaps he was totally unaware, perhaps he was telling the truth. Or at least maybe he was telling the truth about having dismantled everything, that there were no programs still in place, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
There are two things that come out of this article, the first that Hussein had clairvoyant knowledge of terror attacks that would happen in the US and Britain, and the second being that he knew about weapons programs and was actively hiding them. My postulations were rather incorrect, what was my first instinctual reactions were more true, that Hussein -was- up to something, and -was- a danger.
The article is about tapes, recording tapes found after the liberation/occupation. The tapes were made by Hussein prior to the invasion, sometime long before the invasion, but they illustrate the thinking and dialog that happened in Iraq by their dictator. In our first example, from the article,
In the tapes, Saddam Hussein says: “Terrorism is coming. I told the Americans… and told the British as well… that in the future there will be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.
So he figured terror was coming, and it was going to come in a huge way, he even says he told us. This leads us to two conclusions, first, that a previous administration should have been warned, and second, they apparently didn’t do anything about it. Though Hussein may have indicated to his own administration that the terror would not be coming from Iraq, the simple fact that he was warning the US and Britain, indicates he had some knowledge. Therefore, we could draw an assumption that Hussein had been in talks with others about terrorism, others such as the likes of Bin Laden. It may be a circumstantial link, but we don’t have access to all the tapes in order to know for sure. Perhaps there is something else in another tape that makes a more solid link.
At the end of the article, the reporter mentions there is no evidence in the tapes that Iraq was still hiding weapons or programs; however, this quote which finishes the article speaks volumes,
Charles Duelfer, a US inspector who helped look for
weapons of mass destruction after the war, said the tapes “support the
conclusion we made… that the regime had the intention of building and
rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, when circumstances permitted”.
Previous to this statement, Hussein’s son-in-law talks to Hussein about how the UN inspectors did not find everything because Iraq did not reveal everything. Iraq was blatantly engaged in deception, and Duelfer’s assertion is that Iraq could still have been hiding things. This conclusion is further supported by Husseins refusal to allow UN inspectors into many sites, and many times having the inspectors sent home. The tapes reveal the UN inspectors got close, perhaps too close to knowing the real truth. Hussein had to be very cautious and not allow the inspectors access.
Duelfer’s last statement speaks to the timing of Hussein’s activity, in that weapons programs were furthered as “circumstances permitted.” This would mean that when UN inspectors got close, you simply shut down operations and make it look like nothing was happening, but when nobody was looking you work like hell to keep going.
During the years prior to the invasion threat by the US, Iraq did not have a lot of time to continue weapons programs because Iraq was under a lot of scrutiny at almost all times. Perhaps Hussein and his administration were not able to forward the programs as much as they could have if no one was watching, but these tapes still indicate there was something there.
So where did it all go? Why haven’t we found more? Those are good questions, and many who speculate the weapons may have been moved, might be right. I think these tapes show the very stable intelligence of Hussein and his administration, that they knew exactly what was going on and how the chips would fall. I think Hussein had intentions of keeping things hidden, even if he had no terror intentions against the US or Britain himself. I think when it became obvious the US was going to invade, he moved things as fast as he could. Where did he move them to? Most likely to another allied country, and I’m not talking about Iran. The mention of Iran brings up another subject about destabilization -because- we invaded Iraq, but I’ll leave that argument to others.
The conclusion I draw from this article is that even though Iraq may not have been a direct threat at the time, they certainly were engaged in covert weapons programs. Was the US right to invade? If we look at the history of Hitler and his rise to power through intelligent deception and the blind eye of other countries, I say yes, we were right to stop this madness now before hundreds of thousands died.
Asa Jay
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