Saddam Lied, Thousands Died.

Anti-war activists claim that President Bush lied us into war in Iraq and thousands died as a result of his lies. New information from Iraq published by the New York Times News Service reveals that the liar was Saddam. The article was republished in the San Diego Union-Tribune. (Here.) According to interviews with former Saddam flunkies and documents from Iraq Saddam was bluffing about possessing weapons of mass destruction. His lies were so effective that even his own generals didn't know.

"The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense."

Saddam didn't just bluff his own military. He fooled the rest of the world as to whether he possessed WMDs. Even when his regime's survival was at stake in the months before the US liberated his people, Saddam continued hide the true state of his WMD program.

"In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the CIA to investigate what happened to Iraq's weapons programs. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.

To ensure Iraq would pass scrutiny by U.N. arms inspectors, Hussein ordered that they be given the access they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons – no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents, and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Hussein's compliance was not complete, though. Iraq's declarations to the United Nations covering what weapons of mass destruction stocks it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where U.N. officials could interview them outside the government's control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator's goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons – a strategy that al-Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a TV interview 'deterrence by doubt.'"

So Saddam deceived his own military, his regional enemies, the UN inspectors, and everybody else about his WMDs. Because he wouldn't come clean his regime was toppled rather than running the risk of leaving him in power with possible access to WMDs. Thousands died as a result. But according to the peaceniks Bush is the liar and the killer not Saddam. There is one good thing that came from Saddam's lies. Millions were freed. O, and there's one more. One day, Saddam will swing by the neck for his crimes.

-tdr

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