That scenario has been brought up before at the Tundra Tabloids, here, and here, and until the mystery of what the Iraqi convoy of trucks were transporting into Syria is solved, the questions surrounding Iraq’s WMD’s remain unanswered.
J’lem Post: An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, Channel 2 stated Monday. Furthermore, according to a report leaked to the TV channel, Syria has arrested 10 intelligence officials following the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh.
Pamela at Atlas Shrugs has the latest by Caroline Glick:
Caroline Glick questions the wisdom of the Bush administration’s illogical desire to keep the lid on the September 6th report. Clearly, it would spoil the fantasy mongering Condi and co. have going on at the UN with their illiberal allies in the unfathomable appeasement of nuclear wielding despotic regimes.
COVERING FOR THE ENEMY
Last year, the US signed an agreement with North Korea. North Korea pledged to disable its nuclear installation at Yongbyon and to give a full accounting of its other nuclear installations, its nuclear arsenal and materials and its nuclear proliferation activities. The US in exchange agreed to lift financial sanctions against Pyongyang, normalize relations between Washington and Pyongyang, remove North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, and provide economic assistance to North Korea. The US is still awaiting North Korean compliance. A disclosure of the nature of the target of Israel’s Sept. 6 operation in Syria, Congress argues, is essential for assessing the reasonableness of the US’s current North Korean policy.
Moreover, Congressional leaders – and most prominently among them, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Peter Hoekstra – have argued that by failing to give a full accounting of the IDF raid, the administration is preventing lawmakers and the US public from making an educated assessment of the nature of the threat that Syria poses to US national security interests. Syria actively promotes war in Iraq by training Iraq-bound fighters on its soil and acting as the major transit point to Iraq for jihadists. Syria is the headquarters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and several other Islamic terror groups. It is Hizbullah’s logistical backbone. While all of these actions are sufficient to place Syria squarely in the camp of US enemies, its apparent nuclear proliferation with Iran and North Korea requires a reclassification of the threat posed by Syria from nuisance to strategic threat.
Finally, American lawmakers have argued that understanding the Israeli operation is essential for understanding the nature of the Iranian-Syrian-North Korean alliance. By preventing the release of details on the raid, the administration is denying Congress and the American public the ability to understand the rationale and the modes of operation of arguably the greatest threat to US national security. How can Congress support an ally like Israel if it doesn’t understand why what Israel does promotes US national security interests? And how can Congress support US actions in the war if it isn’t aware of the nature of the axis fighting the US?
WHAT IS most striking about the Bush administration’s unwillingness to reveal the nature of the Israeli raid to Congress is how it seems to upset the administration’s own war efforts in Iraq. Working together, under Iranian control, for the past five years Syria and Iran have been the major forces behind the war in Iraq. Jihadists of both the Sunni and Shiite variety enter Iraq from Syria and Iran. They receive training in both countries. They receive direction and orders from Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
And yet, rather than make clear to Congress and to the US public that the war in Iraq is not an Iraqi war per se but a key battleground in a regional war in which Iran and Syria have combined forces on multiple fronts in a bid to defeat the US and its allies, the Bush administration obfuscates that central truth. For the past five years, key administration officials have repeated the bizarre claim that Iran and Syria share the US’s interest in bringing stability to Iraq and that responsibility for ending the war rests solely on the shoulders of Iraq’s government rather than on the shoulders of the foreign governments who are waging the war.
The administration itself then holds a major portion of responsibility for the fact that five years after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, the majority of Americans believes that the US doesn’t have an interest in what happens in post-Saddam Iraq and should simply remove its forces from the country at the first opportunity. If the administration was less concerned about obfuscating Syrian and Iranian centrality in the war, there can be little doubt that more Americans would understand why it is essential that the US not allow Iraq to fall into their hands. Indeed, a larger number of Americans would understand that Iran and Syria are waging this proxy war against coalition forces and Iraqis in a bid to advance their goal of regional dominance.
Notably the US official who has been most consistent in highlighting Iran’s central role in Iraq is US Commander in Iraq General David Petreaus. Petreaus and his officers, whose job it is to win the war in Iraq, apparently understand what the administration has spent the past five years ignoring. They understand that to secure the public support necessary to fight a long war, they need to tell the American public what the war is about, who the US is fighting and what is at stake.
Hopefully soon we’ll find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes, and it’s highly probable that it runs very deep indeed. *L* KGS
