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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Carter Andress</title>
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		<title>Why the World Did Not Know about WMD in Iraq</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/carter-andress/why-the-world-did-not-know-about-wmd-in-iraq/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-the-world-did-not-know-about-wmd-in-iraq</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2014 05:51:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Carter Andress]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bush]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Found]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245527</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The reason the Bush administration never crowed about the approximately 5,000 chemical munitions that U.S. forces uncovered throughout Iraq.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SuperStock_1792-80825.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245529" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SuperStock_1792-80825.jpg" alt="1792-80825" width="324" height="215" /></a>After U.S. Central Command called on us to help transport from Iraq enough yellowcake uranium to make several atomic bombs stored at Saddam’s nuclear weapons complex, I realized why neither the Pentagon nor the White House advertised the presence of this WMD precursor: safety and security.</p>
<p>Before the U.S. military moved in to secure the facility after the 2003 invasion, looters had been there first. Even though the universally recognized yellow-and-black radioactivity warnings were posted on the bunkers, locals had ripped open the storage areas and stolen casks of yellowcake with many sickened as a result. More importantly, we did not want the insurgents alerted to the exposed stockpile as they might attack the facility. This is also why the George W. Bush administration did not crow about the approximately 5,000 chemical munitions that U.S. forces uncovered throughout Iraq, as recently reported by the New York Times. That is a serious quantity of WMD, by any standard. Interestingly, the Bush team could have diluted near-uniform shock at the failure to find WMD by highlighting these discoveries instead of allowing the narrative we all know to solidify: “no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq found except a few dozen old, mustard-gas artillery shells left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.” Yet President Bush and his advisors chose to protect the troops and the mission rather than score political points back on the war’s second front, the American body politic. (None of this, however, mitigates any unpreparedness by the Pentagon to treat service members exposed to chemical weapons.)</p>
<p>Before my company arrived to provide guards and to build and operate a base camp for U.S. Department of Energy scientists dissecting Saddam’s nuclear weapons facility, the American Army had occupied the site with almost a company of infantry. This was quite a bit of combat power tethered to a non-populated, static location when needed to actively defend the people against the elusive al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists and Iranian-allied militias rampant until early 2008 when the American Surge forces and the Sunni Arab “Awakening” had turned the tide delivering our victory in the Iraq War. The limited number of combat troops available did not permit fixing them at every site where WMD were found or might be found. Hence the requirement to not advertise that Saddam had left thousands of chemical weapons lying around, potentially under any mound in mostly flat Iraq. That would have set off a dangerous treasure hunt—and if found, a tremendous threat to American troops and everyone in Iraq especially if weaponized nerve gas had ended up with al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>We were able to move the yellowcake successfully because of our proven relationships with the tribes along our supply line to the nuclear weapons facility, located at the center of an area known as the “Triangle of Death,” due to extensive U.S. combat fatalities suffered there. Because of our and other U.S. government contractors’ employment of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, we helped drain the swamp (or “sea” in Maoist terms) whence the al-Qaeda insurgency sprung. The uranium operation caused us, as usual, to rent trucks from the surrounding tribes with comprehensive war-loss insurance (meaning if a truck got blown up then the owner took the loss). This in turn caused the tribes to look outwards on the convoy movements to protect their expensive tractor trailers instead of inwards—searching for a chance to attack. Doing business for the tribes with the American government, and then the Iraqi government, turned out to be safer than supporting the nihilistic, totalitarian jihadis and the traitorous Sadrists, minions of Iran.</p>
<p>Regardless of what position one takes on the U.S. invasion, the world could not abide by large quantities of nuclear weapons precursor in the hands of the genocidal tyrant in Baghdad. As we are seeing with the current, seemingly endless negotiations with Iran, the millionaire mullahs of Tehran are using the pretext of “peaceful” nuclear power generation in order to assert that the denial thereof is a direct assault on a nation’s sovereignty. Consequently, the concept that we could have gotten the yellowcake removed from Iraq as a part of lifting the rapidly degrading sanctions and truly certifying the country clean of all chemical weapons without the overthrow of Saddam defies logic and experience. The continued possession by Iraq of approximately 5,000 chemical warheads undiscovered after almost eight years of aggressive UN inspections along with the existence of enough yellowcake uranium to make 14 or so nuclear bombs with technology that the Iranians and Libyans already possessed calls for a new coda to replace “Bush lied, people died.” Certainly, we should look to the reinstatement of a principle justification for the American invasion of Iraq.</p>
<p><i>Carter Andress is president of AISG, Inc. (American-Iraqi Solutions Group) and the author, with Malcolm McConnell, of </i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Undone-Defeat-al-Qaeda-Resurrection/dp/1621572803"><span style="color: #0463c1;">Victory Undone: The Defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Its Resurrection as ISIS</span></a><i> (Regnery, October 2014).    </i></p>
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		<title>We Drove Saddam’s Yellowcake to the Baghdad Airport</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/carter-andress/we-drove-saddams-yellowcake-to-the-baghdad-airport/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=we-drove-saddams-yellowcake-to-the-baghdad-airport</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Nov 2014 05:35:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Carter Andress]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[existed]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244245</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I know Baathist Iraq’s WMD potential existed.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ert.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244250" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ert-450x301.jpeg" alt="ert" width="306" height="205" /></a>As someone who led the company that transported 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium—enough to make fourteen Hiroshima-size bombs—from Saddam’s nuclear complex in the Iraq War’s notorious “Triangle of Death” for air shipment out of the country, I know Baathist Iraq’s WMD potential existed. In early 2008, we secretly moved over several nights 140 truckloads carrying 5500 barrels of extremely heavy radioactive material provided to Iraq as part of the French-supplied Osiraq reactor destroyed by Israeli fighter bombers in 1981. The virulently anti-Semitic Saddam had announced “here begins the Arab bomb” and the Israelis took him at his word.</p>
<p>The recent article in the New York Times, however, caught us all by surprise. Random caches of old chemical weapons found post-invasion were old news, but not “roughly 5,000” warheads and bombs, many filled with still active, nerve agent. That’s an enormous quantity even if evidently left over from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War. Just “antiques,” as the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung quaintly put it at a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum on Iraq.</p>
<p>At the least, this shocker (after so many years of repetitious “Bush lied [about WMD], people died”) further points to the world’s inability to trust that the UN inspectors could ever realistically certify Saddam clean of his nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. He had to be deposed, and the only way to do it was for us to invade and overthrow his dictatorship. Here was a genocidal, expansionist tyrant who had used chemical weapons on his own people and that of a neighboring nation (Iran), publically celebrated 9/11, and allowed a chemical weapons laboratory affiliated with al-Qaeda to operate within his security forces’ reach inside his country’s borders in contested Kurdistan (Khurmal).</p>
<p>The article in the Times references the Duelfer Report that summed up the official American investigation of Iraq’s WMD as definitive in that there were no ongoing WMD programs pre-invasion, yet fails to mention that every section of the report on the different types of weapons of mass destruction concluded that the evidence gathered by investigators clearly indicated that once sanctions were removed Saddam would reinstate his WMD programs. In addition, the article mentions that the chemical weapons program was not active for over ten years, but not the biological weapons program, which extended into 1996 and was only discovered because Saddam’s son-in-law defected, even after five years of aggressive UN inspections.</p>
<p>There’s no question in my mind, Saddamist Iraq would have reconstituted its WMD programs once UN sanctions faded away—a push Security Council veto-wielding members Russia and France were actively working toward because of oil field opportunities. (Petroleum companies from both countries signed huge, new contracts with Saddam pre-invasion.) And given the yellowcake inventory, nuclear weapons with available Pakistani and North Korean technology might not have been far off. After over ten years in effect, the sanctions system was actively degrading with banned flights landing in Baghdad, the Oil for Food program corrupted, and, as a result, would have collapsed if we had not invaded—thus leaving Saddam free to threaten the world again with WMD.</p>
<p>The greater problem, however, of significant quantities of chemical weapons hidden at some date prior to the US invasion points to a current and growing threat. The leader of the neo-Saddamists allied now with ISIS is Izzat al-Douri, a former Iraqi army general and last member of the senior Baathist leadership not executed or imprisoned. There is a distinct possibility that Saddam’s minions hid these munitions with the intention of disinterring them for deterrent use once again. And in fact, this is why Saddam’s military and secret police leaders never ceased to believe Iraq possessed WMD and could therefore project terror onto the Kurds and the rest of the region (Israel and Iran, specifically) until the end because Iraq did possess WMD, even after the dictator’s death by hanging. The Iraqi army and security services did not handle “special” weapons without the knowledge of the regime’s leaders. So to think that Saddam and his immediate circle, including al-Douri, did not know the locations of the WMD discussed in the Times article begs credulity.</p>
<p>Much of the area where the “antique,” yet still potentially potent chemical weapons discovered by US forces is now in the hands of ISIS, the forces of al-Douri, and their allied Sunni Arab tribes undergirding the “caliphate” occupying almost a third of Iraq. With hundreds of Western passport holders fighting in Syria and Iraq, the most immediate threat to the United States is the spread of jihadi terrorism to Europe now that ISIS has a border with Turkey, a gateway to the EU.</p>
<p>Can one even imagine the impact of a weaponized sarin-gas attack in Paris?</p>
<p><strong><em>Carter Andress is president of AISG, Inc. (American-Iraqi Solutions Group) and the author, with Malcolm McConnell, of </em>Victory Undone: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Undone-Defeat-al-Qaeda-Resurrection/dp/1621572803">The Defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Its Resurrection as ISIS</a><em> (Regnery, October 2014).  </em></strong></p>
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