UN investigators tracking down the story of what happened with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction have found 20 engines from banned Iraqi missiles at a Jordanian scrapyard, along with other equipment possibly used to make other banned weapons.
The U.N. team was following up on an earlier discovery of a similar Al Samoud 2 engine in a scrapyard in the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Perricos said inspectors also want to check in Turkey, which has also received scrap metal from Iraq.
The discoveries raise questions about the fate of material and equipment that could be used to produce biological and chemical weapons as well as banned long-range missiles.
The missile engines and some other equipment discovered in the scrapyards had been monitored by U.N. inspectors because of their potential dual use in both legitimate civilian activities and banned weapons production.
Some of these pieces of equipment still had their UN tags, while other pieces of processing equipment was untagged and relatively new.
Unfortunately, the search for what happened to Iraq’s banned weapons between 1998 and the fall of the Ba’athist regime will continue to be long and difficult. Iraq was hardly contained, and evidence of the full extent of their weapons programs may take inspectors across the globe, from Jordanian scrapheaps to Syrian weapons bunkers. In the end, however, the argument that Saddam never had or destroyed such weapons is at best premature.
“In the end, however, the argument that Saddam never had or destroyed such weapons is at best premature.”
And the argument that he had them is definitely true?
That he had them? Absolutely. He used them!!
At one point, as Rob pointed out, yes. We know he had weapons dating back from the Gulf War – we’ve found some of them. In 1998 the UN estimated he had thousands of tons of materials that had never been accounted for. All Hussein would have had to do is prove that they had been destroyed and allowed inspectors to verify those claims. He did not, and given what is known about the amount of traffic between Iraq and Syria prior to the war it suggests that those weapons were not destroyed.
Since nobody on either side advances the argument that he never had WMD’s, isn’t it a rather pointless strawman for you to constantly refute that claim?