Volker said:
He documented the dismantling of these weapons and the production lines to the international community.
This is a rather simplistic assertion that needs to be addressed, even at the risk of hijacking this thread...
Had Saddam
fully and adequately documented the dismantling of these weapons there would have most likely have been no invasion. The international community
knew he had WMDs; the international community
knew he dismantled a large portion of WMDs; the international community
did not know what he did with those that remained unaccounted for--and still doesn't. Repeated requests/demands by the UN for "full and final accounting," as the UN referred to it, of his WMDs were met with continual obfuscation and delay, and was never forthcoming.
The handful of artillery shells that turned up a couple of years ago that had originally been filled with Sarin gas attest to the fact that a portion of Saddam's known WMDs were never accounted for. That those shells were old and degraded was fortuitous. The next ones to turn up might not be so degraded. The fact remains that we still just don't know with an acceptable degree of certainty what remained of his WMD stocks, and we may never know.
It is quite probably true that, after '91 and the initial rounds of dismantling and inspections, that Saddam never had as many WMDs as Saddam led his own generals and the rest of the ME, and therefore, the world, to believe. Though the exact numbers remain unknown, it now appears that Saddam destroyed a much larger portion of his WMDs than he admitted to. In his bid to retain his leadership of the pan-arabists, Saddam gamed them all shamelessly into believing that he retained sufficient "special weapons" (as he referred to them in communications with his military), to repel any attacks.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...
