SEC | The Precision Professional: A Grim Fairy Tale

Drubbed by this sort of rhetoric, it's easy to forget that Iraq's terror weapons are not a matter of speculation, they are historical fact.

During the Iran-Iraq war, over one million Iranians were killed, blinded or mutilated by Saddam's chemical weapons. These weapons were produced in Iraqi factories by the tens of thousands --- then used on the battlefield. Iraq's own paperwork indicates that it developed biological weapons to include anthrax, plague, aflatoxin and ricin. These were not samples burbling in some Petri dish --- Saddam produced bombs, missile warheads and remote control aircraft to scatter these pathogens.

Following the first Gulf War, UN resolutions demanded that Iraq surrender, dismantle and destroy its Weapons of Mass Destruction. For almost a decade, television was filled with the Keystone antics of UN inspectors chasing down Iraqi military convoys, battling obstinate gate guards and launching surprise visits to "Baby Milk" factories. No serious person can suggest that Saddam Hussein cooperated with UN compliance efforts.

But assume for a moment that Blix and Clarke are correct: there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction when the United States re-invaded Iraq in 2003. This would mean that Saddam made a show of thwarting the UN, and then destroyed his WMD in secret. This scenario boggles the mind. Can anyone be expected to believe that Saddam Hussein put himself at the service of world peace --- dismantled all his WMD --- and then committed political suicide? If Saddam destroyed these weapons, why did he not show the world and head off the war he knew would sweep him from power?

Nor are Saddam's chemical and biological weapons the only things that have gone missing.

As early as 1981, fearing that Iraq might build a nuclear weapon, the Israeli air force bombed and damaged the largest of Iraq's nuclear reactors, the French built Tammuz-1. Following this attack, fuel from Tammuz-1 was transferred to a Russian built breeder reactor at Al-Towpath and a uranium hexafluoride centrifuge near Mosul. How is this known? Dr. Khidir Hazama, an MIT educated physicist and former director of Iraq's nuclear weapons effort, stated that these two plants operated at "full blast" for almost a decade after the Israeli attack. The electrical output from these facilities was nil --- they existed only to produce weapons grade material for an atomic bomb.

Hazama was finally able to defect to the United States in 1993. He informed his debriefers about Iraq's vast, well funded and covert nuclear program. The US was notified that Iraq produced at least 12 kilograms of Uranium enriched to 93 percent, and a further 14 kilograms enriched to 80%. Hazama said also that Iraq had a workable weapon design, its single technological barrier had been refining sufficient quantities of enriched uranium. The CIA did not believe him.

The United States was unpleasantly surprised when Pakistan detonated a nuclear device in 1998. The CIA was found later to be equally unaware of the extent to which Pakistan had proliferated nuclear expertise and equipment. The CIA's underestimation of the Pakistani nuclear program was breathtaking. Could the CIA have been wrong about Pakistan, but correct insisting that Iraq was "years away" from producing a nuclear weapon?

Living now in the United States, Khidir Hazama remains an important source of information about Iraq's nuclear program. Asked how close Saddam was to completing a nuclear device, Hamaza has been direct: "Very," he said. It is not reassuring to learn that CIA case officers twice rebuffed Dr. Hamaza in his attempts to defect. When his story did not jibe with the facts as the CIA knew them, Hamaza was dismissed as a crank.

The nation of Iraq is approximately the size of California. Its geography is similarly varied. In that vast place, not one Iraqi chemical weapon has been unearthed --- even though tens of thousands of them were known to have been manufactured. Not one nuclear component has been discovered and not one ounce of weapons grade material has been recovered --- even though Iraq conducted a decades long scientific and industrial effort to build a bomb.

The UN looked and found nothing. From that bit of history, Clarke and Blix draw an unsubstantiated and dangerously naive conclusion. A plain fact calls out: Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, tens of thousands of them, and now, no one knows where they are. With the exception of a few dented missile warheads, not one scrap of physical evidence supports the hope that Saddam destroyed his chemical or biological stockpile. What happened to the nuclear components, design materials and Uranium isotopes produced by Saddam's nuclear program? Can it be hoped that these unpleasant things, also, do not exist?

Above the persistent issue of why Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction can not be found, a more chilling question looms: Who has them now?

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Chuck Pfarrer served as a military advisor in Central America, trained NATO forces in Europe and the Mediterranean as well as undertaking duties in the Middle East. Pfarrer ended his service as Assault Element Commander at the U.S. Navy's SEAL Team SIX. He witnessed the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, and was one of the SEAL Team leaders responsible for the capture of the terrorist Abu Abbas and the Achille Lauro hijackers in Sigonella, Sicily.

Pfarrer is co-founder and Director of Visual Purple, LLC, a California corporation providing on line National Security Affairs training. He is a sought after consultant on applications relevant to weapons of mass destruction, international counter-terrorism, special operations, counter-proliferation and domestic preparedness. Pfarrer has consulted for the FBI, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the USDA, the Special Operations Command, as well as other government organizations and agencies.

He is the author of the acclaimed memoir Warrior Soul, published in January..