Soccer Dad

Pat a yellowcake

Douglas Feith last week wrote Why we went to war in Iraq. Among his arguments were:

4) While there were large risks involved in a war, the risks of leaving Saddam in power were even larger. The U.S. and British pilots patrolling the no-fly zones were routinely under enemy fire, and a larger confrontation - over Kuwait again or some other issue - appeared virtually certain to arise once Saddam succeeded in getting out from under the U.N.'s crumbling economic sanctions.

Mr. Bush decided it was unacceptable to wait while Saddam advanced his biological weapons program or possibly developed a nuclear weapon. The CIA was mistaken, we all now know, in its assessment that we would find chemical and biological weapons stockpiles in Iraq. But after the fall of the regime, intelligence officials did find chemical and biological weapons programs structured so that Iraq could produce stockpiles in three to five weeks. They also found that Saddam was intent on having a nuclear weapon. The CIA was wrong in saying just before the war that his nuclear program was active; but Iraq appears to have been in a position to make a nuclear weapon in less than a year if it purchased fissile material from a supplier such as North Korea.

(via memeorandum)
The Booman Tribune responded thoughtfully Feith is still the stupidest guy:

Feith pushes a false narrative on us, but it's a familiar one. We had no reliable intelligence in 2001 that suggested that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons programs.
His armed forces were weak, disloyal, ill-paid, ill-equipped, and totally unable to project force towards any of his neighbors. Insofar as the Intelligence Community worked on the issue of Iraq, they were mainly concerned with an international disinformation campaign to heighten the threat from Saddam in order to maintain support for a crumbling sanctions regime. Belief in Iraq's WMD's was nothing more than a convenient case of believing our own hype. How many times did the Bush administration point to misinformation put out by the Clinton administration to bolster their case for war (and to justify their decision after the fact)?

(via memeorandum)

The AP now reports:

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program _ a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium _ reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" _ the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment _ was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

What's now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad _ using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine.

(h/t Instapundit)

Admittedly, the AP report acknowledges that the yellowcake had not been obtained since 1991, but it is still evidence that Saddam had an interest in a nuclear program. In fact this news, despite the way it's being spun by the NYT

Headline: U.S. Helps Remove Uranium From Iraq

seems to support Feith more than it supports Booman.

Gateway Pundit, Don Surber, the American Thinker and others tie this all together.

The American Thinker links to an excellent article (by Rick Moran) from 3 years ago about the yellowcake. Moran effectively answers the charges of conservative mendacity. In essence, that the IAEA tolerated yellowcake in Saddam's hands is not a defense of Saddam as much as it an indictment of the IAEA.

Posted by SoccerDad at July 6, 2008 11:23 PM | TrackBack