Are the Syrians the chemical geniuses of the Middle East? Many countries, including Russia, now think that the regime in Syria has used chemical weapons against its citizens and if this sounds familiar, think back to Saddam Hussein's attack against his Kurdish citizens. It has been proven that he gassed thousands in 1988.
So now Iraq's neighbor to the East has allegedly used them too. Did the Syrians manufacture these WMDs or did they take the easy road to massacre? Is the hypothesis that the weapons of mass destruction George Bush and his advisors thought were in Iraq might have been moved and stored in Syria? Is this why no weapons of mass destruction were ever found before and after the Iraq
war?
According to several news reports, in January, 2006, former Iraqi general and number 2 person in the Iraqi Air Command, Georges Sada claimed that Saddam’s military transferred large stockpiles of chemical weapons to Syria using civilian aircraft with the passenger seats removed. “There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,’ Mr. Sada said. ‘I am confident they were taken over.’”
Sada claims that 56 trips by two Iraqi Airways Boeings were used to smuggle the weapons into Syria under the guise of transporting civilians. “Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming,” Sada said. “They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians.”
In March, retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney spoke publicly about the likelihood of WMDs in Syria and the high probability that the weapons were moved to Syria immediately prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
After an alleged chemical attack near Aleppo, Syria, Lt. Gen. McInerney was asked what the chances were that the chemicals weapons came from Iraq.
“I think there is a high probability of that,” McInerney declared. “That’s conjecture, but we do know prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, there was a lot of vehicles crossing the border into Syria. And there was a great deal of conjecture. A Iraqi major general swore by it. He said he delivered it. And so I think that it would be a very high probability if we could get into those bunkers that they would have Iraqi signatures on them.”
If the United States authorizes military action without UN approval, we can expect that the White House will claim that this military action is, somehow, radically different from Bush’s military action. Further, Americans shouldn’t expect to hear any apologies from the left to Bush or his supporters. Though Syria’s WMD usage might seem to vindicate President Bush’s intelligence reports, Democrats will likely have a hard time letting go of the increasingly improbable theory that Bush purposefully lied in order to wage a war.
