A rchive Date
[ 16-10-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Salim_Mansur/2004/10/16/670985.html
Weapons or not, Saddam had to go
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
Sat, October 16, 2004
The final report on Saddam Hussein's Iraq, prepared by Charles Duelfer and titled Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD (weapons of mass destruction), is a massive document of over 1,000 pages.
This past week, the mainstream media simply reduced the report to a facile headline that Saddam possessed no WMD, hence U.S. President George Bush lied and the war in Iraq happens to be, in democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry's phrase, a "colossal error of judgment."
David Kay, the former top U.S. weapons inspector, reported earlier this year the same finding. He said "we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here."
By "we," Kay meant that every single permanent member of the UN Security Council and their respective intelligence agencies, including every senior member of the U.S. Congress privy to top intelligence estimates, shared the view prior to the fall of Baghdad that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD.
The only method by which to establish with certainty the true facts about Iraq's WMD was to dismantle Saddam's regime, not to give him time to wreck UN sanctions while continuing to rebuff UN weapons inspectors.
Those who argue otherwise, as do so many in Canada, should make an effort to read at a minimum the executive summary of Duelfer's report.
Duelfer's report is more frightening than Saddam's regime as chronicled by Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual who fled into exile, in his authoritative narratives The Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence.
The report's key finding states Saddam "so dominated the Iraqi regime that its strategic intent was his alone. He wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted."
According to Duelfer, Saddam was "the regime in a strategic sense, and his intent became Iraq's strategic policy." This policy was to make Iraq the Middle East's leading power, irrespective of costs, and to impose Iraq's will on its neighbours.
Saddam made no secret of his intent. He prepared to wait out the UN sanctions, the overseers made corrupt by bribes, before resuming his maniacal quest for power.
The recent book, The Bomb In My Garden by Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam's chief nuclear scientist, describes in great detail the regime's goal of procuring nuclear weapons from the underground network of those who ran the nuclear black market, such as Pakistan's now-discredited scientist A.Q. Khan.
As Sen. John McCain stated at the Republican convention in New York, the choice facing America on Saddam's Iraq in the post-9/11 world was not "between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat."
Some 80 years ago the world was informed in Mein Kampf of Hitler's intent. The leaders of old Europe bent over themselves to appease a thug who became a menace and the near ruin of civilization.
The world this time, by a sheer coincidence of events, came out ahead of Saddam Hussein, catching him in a spider hole rather than being held hostage by him, which is what he surely would have done had he been given time.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at: smansurca@yahoo.ca Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com Home Page
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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