Cheney's Compulsive Obsession with Iraq WMDs & Syrian Nukes

Even after all of this time and President Bush's own abandonment of the WMD theme, Vice President Richard Cheney is still convinced that there are hidden WMDs in the Middle East that bear Saddam Hussein's product mark. A source reported to me yesterday that in the last two weeks, Cheney held forth at a meeting on Iraq WMDs and insisted that they were real and still out there.

Cheney believes that Syria has them -- and has been watching closely intelligence streams from a secret "black SIGINT base" that the US has placed in the mountains near the intersection of the Syrian, Turkish, and Iraqi borders.

Cheney's minions are pushing Congress to sponge up Israeli intelligence assessments about purported Syria-North Korea cooperation on a now destroyed, alleged nuclear site. There are many who doubt Israel's assessments in the U.S. intelligence community. A consensus has built that North Korea and Syria were cooperating on some machine tool operation to retrofit increasingly sophisticated short range missiles with new capacity, perhaps air burst capacity that could potentially deliver biological or chemical agents.

One of the real puzzles that few seem to have the answer to is exactly why Syria would want a Yongbyon-style nuclear reactor and reprocessing facility even if it could have one. As reported on TWN yesterday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has stated to Western visitors that "his engineers are so incompetent that if they tried to build a nuclear facility it would become another Chernobyl."

Whether al-Assad is being truthful or not, I suspect there is some grit in his statement that ought not to be casually shrugged off. Nuclear mishaps in one's own neighborhood aren't trivial.

Furthermore, the more dangerous application of a Yongbyon-like facility would plutonium, which can't be hidden from easy detection. Uranium is tougher to track, but also requires levels of work and capacity-building that the Syrians could never hope to hide. At least for the time being, I'm with Seymour Hersh on the Syria nuke debate.

Nonetheless, there is an effort underway via North Korea nuclear discussions to ferret out what if anything the North Koreans were up to with Syria -- particularly on the nuclear front. Arms Control Wonk has a very useful slice up of the North Korea gambit at the moment.

While I think it's important to sort out the North Korea-Syria dance, I still find it amusing and alarming that Cheney's frame of reference on Iraq is a mad quest for nonexistent WMDs.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Comments

[realist333]

Steve Clemons, like most of us, is mainly right but partly wrong.
The contention that Saddam Hussein's WMD program is alive and well in Syria is no mere pipedream of the Cheney Whitehouse, nor even a case of Israel denouncing an armed and dangerous neighbour.
The minutes of the Saddam Hussein cabinet - which included insiders like Tarik Aziz, "Chemical Ali" et al. - reveal that the entire WMD program was removed from Iraq to Syria shortly after the first Gulf War.
Those cabinet minutes were quoted in a Foreign Affairs article in mid-2007.
Remember that Iraq under Saddam already possessed biochemical weapons which were used with horrid effect both in the war with Iran and in Iraqi Kurdistan. It was the nukes that were still under development. Moving that program to Syria fits the profile of a regime that previously had moved its moribund air force to Iran.
It's a serious mistake to allege that "there never were WMDs in Iraq." It was the unfinished nukes that the UN inspectors failed to find.

[leftLibertarian]

Cheney is fortunate, along with Bush, that the Democrats don't have a sense of justice and a spine, otherwise, both of these criminals would be in prison.

[CFAmick]

I happen to think it's very possible that there still exists WMDs in Iraq, shipped there in the mid-80s with Bush senior's fingerprints all over them. If they are discovered, the public will never hear about it.
In the US, there must be some 55 gallon drums of radioactive material laying out in the Nevada desert, or a filing cabinent full of documents at an abondoned army base somewhere. To find zero evidence of anything in Iraq sounds implausible.

[AdobePhsyko]

Dick has been a Stain on the shorts of our democracy since The Nixon Administration. He and Rumzfeld are a couple of UNAMERICAN war criminals who belong in Prison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMDrI8hHuHI

[beingrepubwontmakeurich]

Dick Cheney is truly diabolical and must be stopped.

[johnb3950]

Who was it said "Sure, we know he has WMD's. We've got the receipts."

[indypete]

Okay, moderators, I'll self-censor and see if you'll put it up this time!

I suppose with N. Korea being in our focus again we can expect the news shows to trot out the tired old shots of N. Korean soldiers goose-stepping to make sure they stay sufficiently demonised.

[Kashathree]

Interesting. WMDs and Nukes are, of course phallic symbols. Since Cheney doesn't have any balls, well................it all makes sense, doesn't it?

[DLSteinhardt]

Larisa Alexandrovna blows the lid off the Syria nuke story elsewhere at HuffPo today.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/heads-up-incoming-propaga_b_98338.html

There never were nukes there. Only old, non-nuclear, N. Korean missiles.

[osprey]

posted this once - can't find it - oh well

Cheney and Chalabi are probably still best buddies - so Chalabi is still spoon feeding Cheney w/bogus info. I just can't wait 'til all of these goons are OUT of office.

[noamjunior]

lil' Dick should get out of Politics and go into comedy- he could be the next Bob hope

[tblue]

More like the next Baghdad Bob.

[indypete]

No, Bob had respect for the troops.

[osprey]

All I can figure is that Cheney is still in love with Chalabi - and that's who is constantley giving him bogus information. What a jerk

[RedDogBear]

Cheney is in love with his Halliburton stock portfolio which goes up in value so long as we keep on making more war. Whether its against Syria or Iran doesn't matter.

[PaleMail]

How right you are. Holding 433,333 stock options in Haliburton, Cheney has made Iraq his very own profit center. More war means more wealth for him and his buds in the military industrial complex.

[landmine]

I'm usually a very left brained, fact based person.
But I have to say my primitive intuition is starting to shout about this strange obsession.
He freely admits his fascination and involvement with "the dark side", which makes me wonder if he knew more and was involved more in wmd's than we suspect.
Like:
1. Did we at some time or another when Saddam was a friend, give them some?
2. Did we plant some, but lose them?
3. or is he just trying to vindicate himself and the prez based on his own "gut" feeling?

Whatever it is, something smells bad.

[Mark701]

Good points. Never really thought about it this way. To be honest however, I think Cheney is just a whack job, out of his mind. He's paranoid for sure, which is why he had google scrub his residence from google world. In part he's probably "projecting" i.e. if he were Saddam Hussein he would have nukes hidden all over the place. Regardless, I don't anyone other than the 25 percenters that believe anything he says anymore.

[osprey]

Well we gave Iraq WMD and we were Saddams friend at one time
We probably planted some - I've thought of that

Cheney is nuts

[RedDogBear]

"1. Did we at some time or another when Saddam was a friend, give them some?" You don't have to wonder about this. Its pretty much a well documented fact that we did. As documented in http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040112/scheer1230
"It was Rumsfeld and Shultz who told Hussein and his emissaries that US statements generally condemning the use of chemical weapons would not interfere with relations between secular Iraq and the Reagan Administration, which took Iraq off the terrorist-nations list and embraced Hussein"
The thing is that all the WMD that Saddam acquired with Rumsfield's help were destroyed by weapons inspectors after the first gulf war or just used up by the time of the Iraq invasion. Cheney is just doing what he has done since he was in the Reagan administration. Maintaining a "Team B" intelligence unit culled from suckups in the CIA and elsewhere who will invent the intelligence that he wants to hear.

[JoeBlough]

"Congress to sponge up Israeli intelligence assessments"

Gee, i'll bet that assesment isn't baised. Cheney believes only the information that backs up his pre-conceived notions. Disregards the rest. That's why he has destroyed the American brand name value.

[SeaOats]

Dementia. Must be the advanced artery disease.

[ARBOC2]

Unlike Reagan who was clearly out of his mind toward the end of his administration and more or less got away with it, Cheney exuded a deranged mind from before he took over the fascist based Bush political tragedy. Perhaps the right wing nuts will press for his visage on Mt. Rushmore right next to Reagan's.