The body of evidence suggesting Iraqi complicity in the Sept. 11 atrocities and subsequent anthrax mailings is now quite large. That the Iraqi dictator has the means, motive and opportunity to be an accessory cannot be denied. To wit:
Saddam Hussein is an inveterate America-hater with a festering sense of revenge for the ignominy of the Gulf War.
Saddam considers terrorism an instrument of national policy. A collaboration between the Ba’ath Party dictatorship and al-Qaeda is entirely reasonable — “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Hussein, a secular dictator, has in recent years courted Sunni Islamists and has even changed the Iraqi flag to include the inscription “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) in his own calligraphy.
According to Jane’s Security, Israeli military intelligence believes Iraq helped finance the Sept. 11 attacks.
There are reports from Iraqi defectors that as recently as last year, Islamic extremists were training in hijacking techniques on a Boeing 707 located in Salman Pak, an area south of Baghdad.
There was a meeting between lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, nominally an Iraqi diplomat, that took place in Prague last April.
Saddam used weaponized anthrax against his own Kurdish population before resorting to more lethally effective chemical weapons.
Richard Butler, the former chairman of UNSCOM, recently told Frontline, “The highest degree of resistance (to weapons inspections) was in the biological area, which leads me to conclude that this (is) Saddam’s favorite toy: killing people with germs.”
The professionally prepared and precisely-sized anthrax spores, complete with the additive bentonite to reduce static cling, all but rules out our own lunatic fringe or al-Qaeda terrorists working alone out of caves as the original source of the anthrax. Iraq is one of the only states capable of producing this quality of weapons-grade anthrax.
The demise of Saddam Hussein has a lot to recommend it. First, the continuing human rights abuses of his regime are most distressing.
Second, it is manifestly clear that Saddam has never complied with U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War and required Iraq unconditionally to destroy and never to develop, construct or acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Since the United Nations gave up on inspections three years ago, Saddam has without doubt reconstituted his programs to produce these weapons. Khidhir Hamza, who headed Iraq’s nuclear weapons program before defecting to the West, believes Saddam will be able to deploy as many as three nuclear devices by 2005. To put not too fine a point on it, this man and his addiction to weapons of mass destruction remain a very serious problem.
Third, as already noted, Saddam’s involvement in the recent terror attacks is beyond reasonable doubt.
And fourth, it is only a matter of time before Saddam sponsors another and possibly much deadlier terror attack than the Sept. 11 massacre — next time possibly using a weapon of mass destruction. The death and devastation at the World Trade Center will pale into insignificance compared to the scenario painted for the detonation of even a primitive nuclear device in a large population center.
It is therefore urgent that Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s Ba’ath Party be the next targets in the war against terrorism.