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October 28, 2004
A Voice From The Front, Part II

The second part of the interviews with "Mike".

Q. Obviously, the Iraqis got this ammunition hand over fist before our invasion, and as you said, a good portion of it wasn’t deployable by the Iraqi military. Was any of this disappearing into terrorist hands before the war?

A. Of course! There’s the terrorist side of it; the Wahhabi Muslim terrorists, who see their role in life as to blow up unbelievers that they think are attacking Islam, specifically Israel. The end state for Muslim terrorists is to get the Jews out of Israel, and anyone supporting Israel has got to go along with them. But money is what it was all about in Iraq. There was a minister for everything. There was a land mine minister, an RPG minister, a free-rocket-over-ground minister; for every type of explosive ordinance that exists, there was some minister for it. And he made money by buying the stuff and bringing it into the country, and of course he’d make a profit off of it.

Saddam Hussein believed he was the reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, or at least that’s what he told people. He planned on using it all to blow up Jerusalem.

Q. One of the issues in this presidential campaign has been weapons of mass destruction and whether or not they were present in Iraq. Now obviously what you’re describing is massive weapons of destruction, as you’ve told me before, which probably had more destructive power than some of the WMD we’ve been concerned with in the run-up to the war. What can you tell us about WMDs in Iraq?

A. Did I actually see any WMD? The only thing I can tell you about that is if I saw any. At the right time and the right place, it will be revealed to the American public, because as far as I know, there’s nothing official coming from the United States government that we found any since we invaded Iraq. However, I can tell you that the large amounts of it that we know exist are not in Iraq now. That definitely is true, that the gigantic stockpiles of sarin gas and VX in artillery rounds and the other stuff is nowhere to be found.

That leads to the next question: where is it? There’s no question that the President had good reason to invade Iraq, for all the reasons he gave. I mean, Saddam bragged about all of his WMD and what he was going to do with them against us, so we had more than one just provocation to go in there and find the WMD. If it’s not there, and there’s no inventory and no destruction worksheets or anything, to show he disposed of it in any way, then why is the left-wing media not more interested in finding out where it all went? Because we may just find out in our own country where all that WMD are.

Q. That’s a good point, Mike. You just don’t go out in the desert and blow up a bunch of sarin gas containers; you have to do that in a controlled environment. You’d expect there to be some kind of record that the stuff got destroyed because you have to make certain preparations to make sure it doesn’t get out and contaminate the countryside.

A. Right. And why would he do it anyway? He was thumbing his nose at us the entire time. He was violating every UN sanction, everything that the UN told him to do. What would he have to lose by offloading it onto terrorists?

Q. The story you hear from the press is that he didn’t have the stuff, and he lied to his own people. Telling them he didn’t have it would have undermined his power, leaving him more vulnerable to being overthrown by his own people. That’s the story we hear right now.

A. Part of that is true. There was a lot of bravado in the things he told his own people. Still, it doesn’t mean – it actually validates our invasion. If he’s telling that to his own people and we think he still has it, then that’s all the more reason to invade when we did. Obviously, he didn’t have it the moment we walked in the door, most of it was gone. But we know he had thousands of tons of it at a certain point in time, because he used it on his own people. There were inspectors who saw it and gave him a time frame to get rid of it, and somehow it was gone – but where did it go?

That brings me to my next point. So there’s not a lot of WMD being used against us – in fact, it hasn’t been used against us at all. What they’re using is low-tech weapons. They’re using 155mm artillery shells, and basically the entire Saddam arsenal is being used against us from Iraq to Israel, and who knows where else? It’s a project which needs to be seen all the way through to its end state. We’re setting aside a small percentage of it that will be usable for the new Iraqi Army, and detonating or open-burning the rest of it.

In the final part, Mike discusses the effect the presidential election is having on the situation in Iraq and his experience with the Iraqi people.

Sphere It Digg! View blog reactions
Posted by Ed Morrissey at October 28, 2004 5:05 AM

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