Where did the WMDs go?

FrontPage Magazine has an interview with former UNSCOM inspector (1996-1998) Bill Tierney on what happened to Iraqs WMDs, which we all know Saddam Hussein had. The question has been, since the war with Iraq started and the massive stockpiles we expected to find weren’t there is: where did they go?

What I found particularly interesting about this piece was when Tierney believed that Saddam began preparing for a possible war with the US: 2002 (emphasis added):

While working counter-infiltration in Baghdad, I noticed a pattern among infiltrators that their cover stories would start around Summer or Fall of 2002. From this and other observations, I believe Saddam planned for a U.S. invasion after President Bush’s speech at West Point in 2002. One of the steps taken was to prepare the younger generation of the security services with English so they could infiltrate our ranks, another was either to destroy or move WMDs to other countries, principally Syria. Starting in the Summer of 2002, the Iraqis had months to purge their files and create cover stories, such as the letter from Hossam Amin, head of the Iraqi outfit that monitored the weapons inspectors, stating after Hussein Kamal’s defection that the weapons were all destroyed in 1991

Note the Syria connection, which Tierney makes several times in the article. It has long been speculated that there were stockpiles of weapons moved from Iraq to Syria over the course of several months prior to the starting of the war with Iraq. While certainly it’s possible that Saddam started preparations sometime in the summer of 2002, it’s also very possible that the seed was planted in his head that the US aimed to finally disarm Iraq by a top official in Syria, who was told by none other than US Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) in January 2002 that he (Sen. Rockefeller) believed that the President was preparing to invade Iraq. By Rockefeller’s own admission (emphasis added):

SEN. ROCKEFELLER: No. The – I mean, this question is asked a thousand times and I’ll be happy to answer it a thousand times. I took a trip by myself in January of 2002 to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, and I told each of the heads of state that it was my view that George Bush had already made up his mind to go to war against Iraq – that that was a predetermined set course which had taken shape shortly after 9/11.

It’s become more and more clear to me, and anyone else who has followed the story of what happened to Iraq’s WMDs that Saddam Hussein had plenty of time to move, hide, flush down a river, bury, and/or destroy the unaccounted-for stockpiles of WMD. Not only is it very likely that he received advance notice of this through a top Syrian official thanks to the big mouth of a Democratic US Senator, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the back and forth wrangling at the UN we had to do from the time the President made his speech there in September 2002 to the time of the actual start of the war, Saddam Hussein had plenty of time to move WMDs. In my view, this is thanks to the spineless UN and an anti-war Democratic US Senator who tipped him off via discussions with an ally to Iraq: Syria.

Hat tip to Lorie Byrd for the FrontPage link.

(Cross-posted at Blogs For Bush)