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So Where Are The Weapons Of Mass Destruction?

Monday, April 14, 2003
IslamOnline.net & News Agencies

Refuting U.S. claims, the paper went on, “The administration has shown its embarrassment in other ways. On day two of the war, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, said finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction was the invading force's number two priority after toppling Saddam Hussein - itself a reversal of the argument presented at the UN Security Council. “A week later, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, pushed the issue further down the list, behind capturing and evicting "terrorists sheltered in Iraq" and collecting intelligence on "terrorist networks". "Now we are told that hunting for weapons is something we can expect once the fighting is over, and that it might go on for months before yielding significant results. "It's hard work," a plaintive Ms Clarke said last week.

LONDON -- IO
Now that the U.S.-led forces actually invaded and occupied Iraq, now that Saddam Hussein’s regime no longer exists, the question remains; where are Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? A leading British paper asked Sunday, April 13.

“They were the reason the United States and Britain were in such a hurry to go to war, the threat the rank-and-file troops feared most. And yet, after three weeks of war, after the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- those weapons that President Bush, on the eve of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the United States -- have still to be identified,” The Independent said.

“Many influential people -- disarmament experts, present and former United Nations arms inspectors, our own Robin Cook -- have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all.

“The public surrender of a senior Iraqi scientist could yet backfire against the U.S. and Britain. Lieutenant-General Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, who handed himself over to U.S. forces Saturday, continued to proclaim that Iraq no longer holds any chemical or biological weapons. He should know: the British-educated chemical expert headed the Iraqi delegation at weapons talks with the United Nations.

“The few "discoveries" trumpeted in the media - the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there - have not been on a scale that could reasonably justify the unprovoked military invasion of a sovereign country, and in most cases have been proven to been no more than rumor, or propaganda, or a mixture of the two,” charged the paper.
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2003 © Islam Online.

In a world of instant tea and instant coffee, many arm-chair media sources seem to expect instant results from a war-torn desert.

Dan