A decade or so ago, one of the original stated reasons for our excursion to Iraq was more or less debunked. At least according to popular or political opinion anyway. That reason was the biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction most intelligence experts, and even those out merely to score political points agreed were in Saddam Hussein’s possession. In fact, intelligence agencies from around the globe believed in their existence. We long offered another possibility -…- maybe a simple relocation to Syria.
As a recent New York Times, (hardly counted as a conservative publication), report shows, chemical WMDs were present in Iraq after the 2003 U.S. invasion and still remain there today. And unfortunately, dozens of our brave and gallant troops were exposed to them. The article notes, “In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”
The Times actually accuses the Pentagon of covering this up: “The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors. The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.”
One theory on this secrecy is that our government was afraid to reveal America’s role in helping to engineer these weapons. The U.S. designed these weapons (manufactured in Europe) in the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was fighting Islamic fundamentalists in Iran.
All this could be a footnote in an otherwise rather successful mission were it not for two terrible truths — the Bush administration failed to adequately deal with several of these chemical WMD sites, and Barack Obama’s complete military withdrawal from Iraq left chemical weapons to the Islamic State, which may already be using them.
During the Iraq war, protocols for destruction and disposal of these mustard gas and sarin canisters were rarely followed due to adverse field conditions and the apparent desire to keep the story out of the media. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty asks, though, “How is it that almost every other national-security secret leaks, but not this one?” One would think that if the end result were to embarrass George W. Bush, the truth would have come out long ago.
The unaccounted for chemical weapons caches and other remnants from a long-ago conflict between Iraq and Iran take on a more frightening dimension when one considers that the Islamic State now controls these old weapons. The Times reports, “The United States government says the abandoned weapons no longer pose a threat. But nearly a decade of wartime experience showed that old Iraqi chemical munitions often remained dangerous when repurposed for local attacks in makeshift bombs, as insurgents did starting by 2004.”
Hindsight is almost always 20/20. But because of recent policy regarding Iraq, the end result of this grand game is that we’ve gone from having a tyrannical but relatively predictable and militarily weak dictator in Saddam Hussein to a fanatical and utterly unpredictable Islamic State controlling these weapon stockpiles. There’s no shortage of Islamic State “martyrs” who would willingly expose themselves to the danger of converting those stockpiles into crude chemical weapons if only to know they would eventually do harm to Americans.
This is the price we now pay for a lack of vigilance and discipline and placing political advantage over fidelity to the mission.