Has he Weapons of Mass Destruction?
Saddam is the only ruler in power today who actually has deployed WMD, and he
has done so often. During the 1980-1988 war with Iran, he showered chemical
gases on Iranian soldiers. He also turned chemicals on his own Kurdish
population.
Further, Saddam is obsessed with building WMD. On losing the Kuwait war in
February 1991, he agreed to U.N. demands that his WMD be "destroyed,
removed or rendered harmless." He also acquiesced to demands that
inspectors be allowed into Iraq to ensure that his WMD program did not start
again. Over the next seven years, however, he did everything in his power to
build chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, plus the missiles with which to
deliver them. In 1998, Saddam refused to allow U.N. inspectors into Iraq any
longer.
It would be, notes Richard Butler, former chief U.N. weapons inspector,
"foolish in the extreme" to believe that Saddam has not been
rebuilding his arsenal since then. Saddam's media confirms this point.
According to reports from Iraqi defectors in December 2001 and March 2002,
Saddam now has "mobile germ laboratories disguised as
milk delivery trucks, and a network of underground bunkers for chemical and
biological weapons production."
In a yet more worrisome development, Khidhir Hamza, former head of Saddam's
nuclear weapons development program and another defector from Iraq, estimates
Saddam will need two to three years "to get the fissile material program
going" for nuclear weapons production. "The bomb design and
hardening," he says, "will probably take another year."
Thus, Saddam will likely have gone nuclear by 2006, and one must count on his
using them. This prospect makes a preemptive attack soon not only advisable but
urgent.
No threat to America?
Saddam and other international terrorists have links to a number of plots
against America. In 1993, Saddam's agents tried to assassinate former President
George H.W. Bush.
Iraq has other links to terrorism against the United States. Czech intelligence
officials now say they have a photo of Mohammed Atta, one
of the 9/11 hijackers, meeting with an Iraqi intelligence agent in
Prague. Two of his co-conspirators were also said to have
met with Iraqi intelligence officers in the United Arab Emirates, while Bin Laden aides reportedly met with officials in Baghdad.