What did the President know about plans to plant WMD in Iraq and when did he know it?
That's the question. And I'm not asking it about the recent report that Brewster Jennings foiled a plan to import WMD and "salt" Iraq to make the Bush/Cheney claims valid. Although, it did occur to me that the assumption, that Mrs. Wilson was targeted in retaliation for something her husband had done, however consistent with the modus operandi of organized crime, was an 'easy' cover for the real reason which, in the interest of national security, couldn't be revealed, the question of what Iraq did or did not have is just a diversion from the real issue.
The WMD I'm asking about are the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads that the United States Air Force has been wanting to stash on the southern flank of the Eurasian Continent for the last four decades.
Clearly, President Kennedy knew about them before he got elected, no doubt from his service in the Senate, because he ordered them not to be deployed in Turkey and, after they were deployed anyway and the Soviet Union objected by sending missiles to Cuba, he had to order them removed as part of a secret deal with Krushchev. But that wasn't revealed to the American public for forty years. And, btw, the missiles are back in Turkey. Who knows how long they've been there and which President approved the importation?
Presumably every President since Kennedy has been informed about the introduction of American WMD into Germany, Belgium, Britain and Italy. Perhaps there's an inventory that comes with the nuclear suitcase that's handed over after he's sworn in. What obviously isn't passed along is any awareness that the public support of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons conflicts with the long-standing practice of letting the Department of Defense introduce WMD into whichever country wants them and, it now appears, even into some that don't. If we don't call it proliferation, it's not.
We do know that Japan, for very good historical reasons, has been reluctant to even see the American nuclear fleet and the Philippines have uninvited the US Air Force and the Navy so the military presence on Guam has gradually increased. Otherwise, the eastern flank of Asia doesn't have nearly the "coverage" the DoD would like. Vietnam, of course, was supposed to help fill that gap, but President Nixon pulled the assets out instead of making sure that communist China was properly "contained."
Iraq, on the other side of the Indian Ocean basin probably looked like a good location to establish a permanent presence for our ICBM "shield" and the availability of oil provided an added incentive to strike a deal with Saddam Hussein. But, despite all kinds of bribes throughout the nineteen eighties (including a significant amount of chemical WMD), the dictator of Iraq just wouldn't agree to turn over some of that "useless" desert to permanent plantations of missiles, satellite tracking stations and a whole array of communications monitoring equipment that would need to be protected by patriots.
But when did the President know what it was that Iraq was supposed to do? When did George Bush the first find out? Was he "in the loop" while Reagan was President and Rumsfeld was dangling WMD as an incentive or did he not find out, like Bill Clinton, until he took possession of the Oval Office? And when was it brought to George the second's attention that patience and time had run out and what Saddam Hussein wouldn't agree to would have to be taken by force. Was he in on the scam before he got elected? Was he, indeed, selected because of his known attraction to deception, to telling lies just for the fun of it? Or was it just assumed that the father's son would go along with whatever he was told?
Surely, if Poppy could make him President, then a plan that had been worked on for three decades could easily be achieved. Perhaps George Bush the second didn't have to know anything more than that. Perhaps treason is just that easy.
Posted by Hannah at November 28, 2005 05:59 AM