Healy: Saddam was never a threat

Gene Healy, writing for Fox News, explains why whether or not we find WMD in Iraq, the larger issue is that it is now obvious that Saddam was never the immediate threat the administration claimed he was.

The focus on missing weapons threatens to obscure the larger point: that with or without chemical and biological weapons, Iraq was never a national security threat to the United States.

The proposition that Saddam Hussein (search) was willing to hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists appears to have been based on sheer speculation, and implausible speculation at that. Despite over 20 years of supporting terror against Israel, Saddam never turned over chemical or biological weapons to Palestinian terror groups (search), reasoning, correctly, that such action would provoke massive retaliation. Still less was he likely to hand over such weapons to Al Qaeda, a group that has long opposed his "socialist infidel" rule and could not be trusted to keep the deal secret.

Moreover, Al Qaeda's behavior suggests that they never expected Saddam to give them chemical or biological weapons. Computer hard drives and paper documents seized in the March 1 capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a top-level Al Qaeda operative, reveal that the terror group had extensive plans to produce chemical and biological agents on its own.

It had never occured to me before that the administration's concerns about Saddam giving al Qeada WMD could be defused by looking at his history with supporting terrorist acts in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but Healy makes an excellent point here. If Saddam was likely to supply terrorists with WMD, wouldn't he have supplied them to Palestinian terrorists by now? His support for them was well-known - something that simply cannot be said about his feelings towards Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda in general.

UPDATE: Discovered I hadn't included a link to the entire article - oops! I've now added that. Sorry!

Posted by thorswitch at June 15, 2003 09:28 PM | TrackBack