Pretend, for a moment, that you’re Bush political strategist Karl Rove. Suppose that Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction, not full-scale nuclear warheads, perhaps, but smaller scale weapons of mass destruction or the building blocks to produce them. Then suppose, during the snafus leading up to the Iraq war, while the US faced delay after delay in launching the invasion, these deadly materials were trucked and flown across Iraq’s borders into Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran.
In other words, suppose there really were WMD or the ingredients to make WMD in Iraq, and we “lost” them. Now ask yourself, the way Rove would, which would be worse for Team Bush politically right before a presidential election — if this stuff accidentally wound up in the hands of fanatical regimes across the Middle East due to pre-war and post-war fumbling, or if it never existed to begin with. I’d go with the second option, and so, I bet, would Rove. Problem is, with each passing day it’s looking more and more like there might be something to the first scenario.
Take the Pentagon’s bizarre response to the Al-Qaqaa site controversy last week. On Wednesday and Thursday, John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told the Washington Times the agency had satellite pictures of truck convoys moving what the agency believes were missile parts and nuclear-related equipment out of the country and into Syria. Russian troops helped truck the stuff out, he and other officials claimed. They also moved some material from Al Qaqaa, too, he said.
On Friday, another set of Pentagon officials trotted out Maj. Austin Pearson for a news conference in which he said his soldiers removed 250 tons of ammunition from Al Qaqaa in April last year and destroyed it 10 days after US forces reached the weapons depot.
Now which is it?
Last week, White House officials claimed Shaw’s explanation was news to them. Nope, never heard that one before, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters on Air Force One about the Times report. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the same thing.
Problem is, they have. Charles Duelfer, architect of the Iraq Survey Group’s Duelfer report, testified Oct. 6 that there was a lot of traffic across border points during the period and that “a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria.”
The Russian angle may be new, but reports of the truck and planeloads of stuff bound for Syria in the days and weeks before — and by some accounts after — the invasion have been around for a while, though what was in them and where it went has never been fully explored.
Then there’s the Oct. 14 Associated Press story, which would have been a bombshell, had anyone noticed it. In it, the AP reported that diplomats insisted that at least two European intelligence agencies had proof that nuclear-related material in Iraq was removed from multiple sites by experts working systematically over an extended period, contradicting Iraqi officials who suggested that little was taken and only randomly by looters.
The “widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement” at sites related to Iraq’s nuclear program was so extensive that whole buildings had been razed, the news service reported. The equipment and expertise this would have required was so sophisticated that at one point, the AP reported, perplexed International Atomic Energy Agency officials thought the Americans had removed sensitive material from Iraq and neglected to tell them.
Given all this, the fact that the Pentagon is suddenly pointing to satellite photos of trucks crossing the Syrian border is hardly surprising. And get this. The reason that one group of defense officials is saying one thing and one group is saying another, the Pentagon explained to the Times, is because Shaw has been working with the Pentagon inspector general investigating the Russian role in the weapons transfers and information from the inspector general’s office is not widely shared with the rest of the Pentagon’s intelligence folks. In other words, they just weren’t talking, which is why no one from the Pentagon except Shaw had thought to mention these important details until last week, just five days before the election.
Sure, that’s what happened.
The truth, I suspect, is something closer to the following. No one wants the world to know what got away in those trucks and planes. Not the UN inspectors, not the IAEA, and definitely not the Bush administration. Either that or they didn’t know themselves, which is just as bad.
Meanwhile, strange news reports about the shadowy movement of potentially deadly stuff Iraq wasn’t supposed to have continue to trickle out, as they have for over a year, while the military continues to find large weapons and ammunition sites no one knew about. Last spring, US Central Command put the official number of these sites at around 50. By this spring they’d raised the number to 100 and counting. Reports of what’s been found, what’s been destroyed, what’s been looted and how much of it there was to begin with vary according to which news organization is doing the reporting and who they are talking to.
But everyone agrees there were no WMDs, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2004.
