Thursday, September 19, 2002
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction revealed evaluate carefully
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
That Iraq is planning and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction can be proven by a few hours' research. That Iraq would turn them over to the bin Laden terrorists is less evident, and may be a secret Iraqi propaganda threat - bin Laden once declared Saddam Hussein an enemy because of his secularity and mistreatment of the Sunni minority. Then came 9/11 and the US reaction, which may have brought them together. Looking at Iraqi history may be helpful in drawing conclusions.
Iraq, the ancient Mesopotamia, home of Abraham the father of both Jews and Arabs, fairyland of legends and of oil, was ruled 6,000 years ago by the of Sumerian city states, then by Sargon's Akkadian empire, then by Assyrian and Babylonian empires. It was governed by Persians for some 1,000 years, until Arabs took control of Baghdad in 652 , and it became the luxurious capital of the Moslem Abbasid Caliphate in 762. Remember tales of Harun-al-Rashid, Sheherazad and the Thousand and One Nights, as collected by the adventurous traveler Sir Richard Burton. The country, a bit larger than California, has Jordan and Syria as its neighbors on the west, Turkey on north, with long border lines with Iran in the east and Saudi Arabia in the south, and a short border with Kuwait between the latter two. The population of 22 million, 75 percent Arab, 20 Kurdish, 5 Turkoman and other, is overwhelmingly Muslim, 2/3ds Shiite (as in Iran), 1/3 Sunni (the faith of world's Muslim majority)
Mongol invaders came in 1258, destroyed Baghdad and the country fell into decline, until the OttomanTurks took over in 1534, remaining in control until WWI. Then the British conquered the Ottoman lands (remember Lawrence of Arabia and his Seven Pillars of Wisdom), and ruled them under a League of Nations mandate, forming countries and passing control to their WWI Arab allies.. Iraq fell to Faisal, the son of Hussein, Sharif of Mecca, a Hashemite,.in 1921, with a full monarchy in 1933. Britain was managing the country's economics by controlling the oil flow through a pipeline, traversing Transjordan to Haifa.
Iraqi nationalists sought to fight the British by coups, enrolling the Italians and Germans in 1941, but by 1943 Iraq declared war against the Axis powers. It joined the Arab League and briefly participated in wars against Israel in 1948. Most of the 85,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel. In 1955 Iraq broke ties with Nasser's revolutionary Egypt and the USSR, joining the Baghdad Pact with UK, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan,.
The Hashemites were overthrown in 1958 by leftist Baath party nationalists, and Iraq allied with USSR, fighting in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel.There were Kurdish rebellions, with bloody suppressions in 1975 and particularly 1979,.after Gen Saddam Hussein al-Takriti assumed control.. He purged the leftists in the Baath movement, executing thousands of opponents, including 21 alleged Communist plotters . The ties with USSR were disrupted. Saddam started buying arms from France and Western Europe. In June 1980 the only political party, Baath Socialist Party, was elected in power.
In September 1979 Shiite Iran, ruled by Ayatollah Khomeini, took 50 US diplomats as hostages in Teheran, and did not release them until January 1981. Border clashes between old enemies Iran and US-favored Iraq started early in 1980, and for months there was skirmishing over control of the 120-mile waterway to the Persian Gulf, Shatt-el-Arab, the confluence of Tigris and Euphrates. Heavy fighting began in September, with bombing attacks on cities, including use of poison gas on both sides, and continued, uneventfully, until 1988, when a UN conference led to a cease-fire. The casualties in the brutal war amounted to a million, a quarter of them Iraqis. Both enemy sides were doing nuclear research, started well before the war. Iraq bought a French reactor for nuclear research in 1976, and in 1981 Israeli bombers destroyed the Ozirak facility, as a military threat..
On Aug 2, 1990, Iraq invaded oil-rich Kuwait, subsequently annexing it. The universal outrage resulted in a UN Security Council's resolution that led to a US-organized coalition of 13 countries and an assembly of 500,000 troops that entered Kuwait and expelled the Iraqis in a four-day ground campaign (after six weeks of air war), occupying much of southern Iraq.. But the Coalition withdrew, leaving Saddam in power, presumably so as not to destroy the regional balance and install Iran as the dominant country, and to protect the West's oil sources. A revolt by the emboldened Kurds and southern Sunnis failed, and Saddam retained power.
Although the Coalition forced Saddam to destroy his atomic program in 1992, he continued research, and UNSCOM inspectors were sent to detect and eliminate his secret laboratories for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Iraq impeded the inspectors' progress, first in late 1997 and then in Dec 1998, causing the teams to withdraw. In return, the UN retained its sanctions against Iraq, demanding that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction be destroyed, and that Iraq improve the conditions of its Kurdish and Sunni Moslem minorities. As President Bush quotes, 16 UN resolutions have been ignored by Iraq.
Saddam has continued secret atomic research, as testified by Dr. Khidir Hamza, the program's director and author of Saddam's Bombmaker (with Jeff Stein, Nov. 2000), who fled the country in 1994. Two knowledgeable brothers, including Hamza's boss, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, both Saddam's sons-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995 and were lured back to Iraq six months later. Executed as conspirators, they were blamed for a secret program of biological weapons. The evidence, one million pages of documents, was planted in Kamel's chicken farm. Saddam expressed his phony outrage over the "treacherous and illegal" program.
Hamza states that Iraq has 1.3 tons of low enriched uranium, smuggled from Brazil, and tons of yellow-cake extract from native potassium. A renegade German scientist, Karl Schaab, in 1989 smuggled in pirated German centrifugal technology, whereby literally thousands of small motorized precision tube centrifuges, deployed all over Iraq, can be used to extract weapon-grade uranium. Allegedly the Pakistanis used a similar pirated method to build their nuclear bombs, over a period of 17 years. Hamza, educated at MIT and Florida State University, heads a Council on Middle Eastern Affairs, and testified at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in August 2002. Per London Times of mid-September date, Hamza has advanced his Iraqi nuclear readiness estimate to the next few months, which may account for Pres. Bush's request for UN action within weeks, if not days. More to come.
That Iraq is planning and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction can be proven by a few hours' research. That Iraq would turn them over to the bin Laden terrorists is less evident, and may be a secret Iraqi propaganda threat - bin Laden once declared Saddam Hussein an enemy because of his secularity and mistreatment of the Sunni minority. Then came 9/11 and the US reaction, which may have brought them together. Looking at Iraqi history may be helpful in drawing conclusions.
Iraq, the ancient Mesopotamia, home of Abraham the father of both Jews and Arabs, fairyland of legends and of oil, was ruled 6,000 years ago by the of Sumerian city states, then by Sargon's Akkadian empire, then by Assyrian and Babylonian empires. It was governed by Persians for some 1,000 years, until Arabs took control of Baghdad in 652 , and it became the luxurious capital of the Moslem Abbasid Caliphate in 762. Remember tales of Harun-al-Rashid, Sheherazad and the Thousand and One Nights, as collected by the adventurous traveler Sir Richard Burton. The country, a bit larger than California, has Jordan and Syria as its neighbors on the west, Turkey on north, with long border lines with Iran in the east and Saudi Arabia in the south, and a short border with Kuwait between the latter two. The population of 22 million, 75 percent Arab, 20 Kurdish, 5 Turkoman and other, is overwhelmingly Muslim, 2/3ds Shiite (as in Iran), 1/3 Sunni (the faith of world's Muslim majority)
Mongol invaders came in 1258, destroyed Baghdad and the country fell into decline, until the OttomanTurks took over in 1534, remaining in control until WWI. Then the British conquered the Ottoman lands (remember Lawrence of Arabia and his Seven Pillars of Wisdom), and ruled them under a League of Nations mandate, forming countries and passing control to their WWI Arab allies.. Iraq fell to Faisal, the son of Hussein, Sharif of Mecca, a Hashemite,.in 1921, with a full monarchy in 1933. Britain was managing the country's economics by controlling the oil flow through a pipeline, traversing Transjordan to Haifa.
Iraqi nationalists sought to fight the British by coups, enrolling the Italians and Germans in 1941, but by 1943 Iraq declared war against the Axis powers. It joined the Arab League and briefly participated in wars against Israel in 1948. Most of the 85,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel. In 1955 Iraq broke ties with Nasser's revolutionary Egypt and the USSR, joining the Baghdad Pact with UK, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan,.
The Hashemites were overthrown in 1958 by leftist Baath party nationalists, and Iraq allied with USSR, fighting in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Israel.There were Kurdish rebellions, with bloody suppressions in 1975 and particularly 1979,.after Gen Saddam Hussein al-Takriti assumed control.. He purged the leftists in the Baath movement, executing thousands of opponents, including 21 alleged Communist plotters . The ties with USSR were disrupted. Saddam started buying arms from France and Western Europe. In June 1980 the only political party, Baath Socialist Party, was elected in power.
In September 1979 Shiite Iran, ruled by Ayatollah Khomeini, took 50 US diplomats as hostages in Teheran, and did not release them until January 1981. Border clashes between old enemies Iran and US-favored Iraq started early in 1980, and for months there was skirmishing over control of the 120-mile waterway to the Persian Gulf, Shatt-el-Arab, the confluence of Tigris and Euphrates. Heavy fighting began in September, with bombing attacks on cities, including use of poison gas on both sides, and continued, uneventfully, until 1988, when a UN conference led to a cease-fire. The casualties in the brutal war amounted to a million, a quarter of them Iraqis. Both enemy sides were doing nuclear research, started well before the war. Iraq bought a French reactor for nuclear research in 1976, and in 1981 Israeli bombers destroyed the Ozirak facility, as a military threat..
On Aug 2, 1990, Iraq invaded oil-rich Kuwait, subsequently annexing it. The universal outrage resulted in a UN Security Council's resolution that led to a US-organized coalition of 13 countries and an assembly of 500,000 troops that entered Kuwait and expelled the Iraqis in a four-day ground campaign (after six weeks of air war), occupying much of southern Iraq.. But the Coalition withdrew, leaving Saddam in power, presumably so as not to destroy the regional balance and install Iran as the dominant country, and to protect the West's oil sources. A revolt by the emboldened Kurds and southern Sunnis failed, and Saddam retained power.
Although the Coalition forced Saddam to destroy his atomic program in 1992, he continued research, and UNSCOM inspectors were sent to detect and eliminate his secret laboratories for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Iraq impeded the inspectors' progress, first in late 1997 and then in Dec 1998, causing the teams to withdraw. In return, the UN retained its sanctions against Iraq, demanding that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction be destroyed, and that Iraq improve the conditions of its Kurdish and Sunni Moslem minorities. As President Bush quotes, 16 UN resolutions have been ignored by Iraq.
Saddam has continued secret atomic research, as testified by Dr. Khidir Hamza, the program's director and author of Saddam's Bombmaker (with Jeff Stein, Nov. 2000), who fled the country in 1994. Two knowledgeable brothers, including Hamza's boss, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, both Saddam's sons-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995 and were lured back to Iraq six months later. Executed as conspirators, they were blamed for a secret program of biological weapons. The evidence, one million pages of documents, was planted in Kamel's chicken farm. Saddam expressed his phony outrage over the "treacherous and illegal" program.
Hamza states that Iraq has 1.3 tons of low enriched uranium, smuggled from Brazil, and tons of yellow-cake extract from native potassium. A renegade German scientist, Karl Schaab, in 1989 smuggled in pirated German centrifugal technology, whereby literally thousands of small motorized precision tube centrifuges, deployed all over Iraq, can be used to extract weapon-grade uranium. Allegedly the Pakistanis used a similar pirated method to build their nuclear bombs, over a period of 17 years. Hamza, educated at MIT and Florida State University, heads a Council on Middle Eastern Affairs, and testified at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings in August 2002. Per London Times of mid-September date, Hamza has advanced his Iraqi nuclear readiness estimate to the next few months, which may account for Pres. Bush's request for UN action within weeks, if not days. More to come.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:51 PM 
