Saddam's Nuclear Program

Last week marked an important milestone in the destruction of Saddam Hussein's WMD program - the elimination of the regime's stockpile of nuclear materials. This particular stockpile had been locked up by the United Nations weapons inspectors prior to the invasion in 2003, so many are discounting last week's event because of that reason - it was there and we knew about it prior to our overthrow of Saddam.

But it's extremely important to realize that as the sanctions were collapsing in the time preceding March of 2003, and after Saddam had repeatedly thrown out the inspectors, that supply (some 550 metric tons) could have been used by Saddam in a weapons program at any time - all he had to do was break the seal on the door. And people conveniently forget that while the reports of the weapons inspectors subsequent to the fall of Saddam admittedly didn't contain reports of newly discovered weapons stockpiles, they did admit that Saddam had two plans in place. The first was to stop the sanctions - something that their allies (the French and the Russians, and some within our own State Department) were well on their way to accomplishing. The second was to reconstitute their WMD programs. In fact, David Kay infamously stated before Congress in 2003 and 2004 that what he found along those lines was significantly more frightening than if he had found WMD stockpiles.

Eventually, an accurate and non-political history of what was going on in Iraq pre-2003 will be written. But until then we have editorials like this one from the New York Sun (Iraq's Yellowcake) to remind us of what might have been:

Here's a story you may have missed over the long holiday weekend: 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium worth tens of millions of dollars were shipped out of Iraq to Canada. The material was transported in 37 military flights in 3,500 secure barrels, according to the Associated Press.

There hasn't been much of a fuss about this material because it had been discovered already by United Nations inspectors after the first Gulf War. But it took a second American war in Iraq to move the material out of the Middle East. For all the talk about America's failure to discover Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, this is a big deal. We've reported on claims by top Israeli officials speaking on the record that Iraq smuggled its chemical weapons to Syria before America invaded in 2003.

The chemical weapons issue is another subject that we haven't heard the last of, but with today's political State Department it will be decades before we find out the truth - simply because no-one presently in charge will press for it. Regardless, this nuclear materials transfer reminds us that we are much, much safer now that Saddam is no longer around - no matter what the naysayers say.