By Ted Weaver                                                                                                   

09/04/2002

In my mind, Saddam Hussein is unquestionably a supporter of terrorism.  Openly paying the families of the Palestinian suicide bombers a stipend is proof enough .  The hate that he openly displays for the Israeli's and the call and the support for their demise is  reminiscent of a past that is not so long ago.  Adolf Hitler quickly comes to mind as one who acted with such vicious aggression against the Jewish people.

At the end of the Gulf war, Saddam Hussein and his military officers signed an agreement of surrender (cease fire), contractually promising to work with UNSCOM inspectors and allow unfettered access to any site in Iraq and to disclose all weapons of mass destruction and to facilitate the destruction thereof. Essentially, what Iraq did by not complying with the agreement after the Gulf war was nothing short, of further acts of aggression and acts of war toward the coalition.

Saddam Hussein's love affair with weapons on mass destruction is alarming. A tyrant, with an aggressive war like medieval mentality, that has used chemical weapons against his own countrymen (the Kurds in northern Iraq) and his enemies during the Iran/Iraq war. Can anyone even remotely question his ability to use such weapons? Does Hussein consider America to be his enemy? 

As the Iraqi's retreated from Kuwait, Saddam ordered his military to light up all of the oil wells. Does anyone remember the ecological disaster this created? I personally don't doubt for one millisecond that he wouldn't use weapons of mass destruction, of either chemical and or biological weapons against our forces as we would easily close in on him. It would be sort of like cornering a rabid animal. 

The question then becomes how do we remove this animal without creating another eco disaster and a large loss of life to others? I think the answer would be to destabilize and do so at a distance until the animal has been trapped and eliminated by our ever increasing high tech robo-army. However long it may take. Then proceed with the insertion of a large number of world community troops and to clean up the related  remaining remnants of Saddam's leadership.   

This whole problem could have been averted, had someone in the leadership level of the U.S. taken the bull by the horns in the first couple of years after the Gulf war when Saddam reneged on and openly challenged the declaration of surrender. 

The UNSCOM inspection team from 1991 to 1995 was a complete joke. During that time, Saddam Hussein continued with his research and development and caching (stockpiling) of his chemical and biological weapons (toys). Then, only after his former "now dead" son in law revealed what little he knew , the weapons inspectors found only what I think is a small amount of the arsenal and disposed of it. By the UNSCOM inspectors own admission outlined in their report, they rejected it citing the report as "inadequate in all areas" .

http://www.fas.org/news/un/iraq/s/990125/dis-bio.htm  (click link to read entire report)

In my opinion, the entire report was porous and incomplete.  It proved Saddams love affair with WMD. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the inspectors didn't locate half of the stockpiles of bio and chemical agents. Unfortunately, the son in law of Saddam Hussein who defected to Jordan, was somehow lured back to Iraq into believing that Saddam had forgiven him (yeah, right). Only to be murdered a short time later by Saddam's intelligence service. Too bad we couldn't have gotten more out of him or if he even knew more.

If anyone thinks that Saddam has only recently built up and stockpiled his weapons of mass destruction, you are dead wrong. Saddam has had these huge stockpiles before and after the Gulf war and continued with research and production of these during the weapons inspection search for them as well as he does today. He thinks that he can ward off any aggressor with this capability. He feels that these are his best defense when it comes to invasion time.  Evidence of Saddam having these huge stockpiles reaches way back into the1980s during the war with Iran.

My personal opinion is that I think the world community should play a role in this. They have a responsibility in this matter too. France for instance. It wasn't that long ago that they were invaded by Germany. Their freedom was taken away. Their women raped, the men and boys killed. Their land, money, gold and art looted. Most of which as of today, is still unaccounted for. Their cities laid in ruins. Grave yards and mass burial sites sprang up. What about the thousands of foreign soldiers buried in the land of Occupied France who came to their rescue to free them from an invading army and tyrant.

How quickly some forget what happens, when you have a tyrant on the loose that has a love affair with weapons of mass destruction. One that has shown a callous disregard to respecting the borders of sovereign nations and most importantly, human life.

I like a quote that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to say about the subject of neutrality and inaction some years prior to the U.S. entering world war II:

Innocent peoples are being cruelly sacrificed to a greed for power and supremacy...Let no one imagine that America will escape...There is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality...War is a contagion, whether it be declared or not. It seems unfortunately true that the epidemic of lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease. I call today for a similar quarantine. A quarantine of the lawless, a quarantine of those that threaten world peace.

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Quarantine Speech, 10/5/37

On the matter of possible future Inspections with Saddam in charge, they won't work. Just like before, there would be this hide and seek game by Saddam. Making the rules as he goes. Intimidating the inspectors, making research for the records next to impossible, if not impossible, most often offering conflicting accounts and incomplete information, plus a full range of other deceptive practices and hindering and preventing the inspectors access to a site when they arrive unannounced.              The record speaks for itself.

This tyrant, left go and unchecked, sooner or later, will attempt to start a world war  just like Hitler did. Personally, I think Saddam was involved in 9/11 and supplied the  anthrax. The connection and meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and a known senior intelligence official from Iraq Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani in 2000 and 2001 in the Czech Republic has been backed up by the Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross.  To this day, they stand behind this report with pictures as evidence. This proves direct connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. This evidence and intelligence cannot be discounted or ignored. 

There is not a question in my mind as to whether Saddam 'Hitler" Hussein must go, the real question seems to be is how we get there, and how it gets done.