IDF Lt. Gen. Yoshe Ya’alon re-asserts that Saddam’s WMD stockpiles went to Syria shortly before Operation Enduring Freedom began:
The Israeli officer, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. ‘He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria,’ General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. ‘No one went to Syria to find it.’
From July 2002 to June 2005, when he retired, General Yaalon was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Force, the top job in the Israeli military, analogous to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the American military. He is now a military fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He made similar, but more speculative, remarks in April 2004 that attracted little notice in America; at that time he was quoted as saying of the Iraqi weapons, ‘Perhaps they transferred them to another country, such as Syria.’
The Israelis aren’t the only ones who believe this, as the article continues:
An Iraqi politician, Mithal Al-Alusi, whose sons were both assassinated in Iraq last year, told The New York Sun’s Eli Lake last month that his party would press the Iraqi government to renew the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Al-Alusi said he believes Saddam clearly had the weapons before the invasion. “They will find the weapons, I am sure they will,” Mr. Al-Alusi said.
Despite all of this, despite the assertions in 2003 by the entire intelligence community that believed Iraq had WMD, can reasonable people still maintain we were lied to by the Bush administration to go to war?
When the IDF’s top general says Iraq had WMDs, that’s probably a good indication they were there – especially since Israel was the target of SCUD attacks in 1991 that could very well have carried chemical or biological weapons if so desired.