This article backs up the contentions of the book I recently read called The Haj by Leon Uris.
It is disgusting to read, so tread lightly mamas.
Jenny Hatch

Novak: Wilson did not forcefully object to naming of CIA wife in column.
After five million, two hundred, and seventy three thousand, and twenty five hundred, and seven stories on this so called scandal……can we finally, now, admit….it was a NON-event???
Jenny Hatch

The Middle East is not falling down.
Jenny Hatch
Pajamas version, with great comments.

When you have a few minutes go read this account by Hitchens. It brought me to tears.
A Death in the Family.
Jenny Hatch
PS In my school girl enthusiasm, I used to think that every patriot who fought in the Revolutionary War was as convicted and gung ho as George Washington. I even believed that every soldier who died was happy to go, knowing that he had fought for the most important cause humanity had ever engaged in.
When as an adult I began to read Biographies of Washington which painted a much more clear picture of reality, I was absolutely gobsmacked at the level of corruption, betrayal (Sure we all heard of Benedict Arnold), infighting, petty squabbles, and reversals that defined the Revolutionary War of America.
Yet aren’t we glad they persevered?
I believe our Iraqi friends, when looking back two hundred years from now will have a similar sense of purpose and vision, understanding that the cause of Freedom is ALWAYS worth the fight, and yes, the deaths that accompany the fight.

Read the whole thing…it really backs up Ion Pacepas claim that Sadaam had been taught by the soviets to do everything he could to protect the documentation of the WMD’s no matter what.
“Pacepa: Contemporary political memory seems to be conveniently afflicted with some kind of Alzheimer’s disease. Not long ago, every Western leader, starting with President Clinton, fumed against Saddam’s WMD. Now almost no one remembers that after General Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995, he helped us find “more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes” containing documentation “dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear.”
He also aided UNSCOM to fish out of the Tigris River high-grade missile components prohibited to Iraq. That was exactly what my old Soviet-made “Sãrindar” plan stated he should do in case of emergency: destroy the weapons, hide the equipment, and preserve the documentation. No wonder Saddam hastened to lure Kamel back to Iraq, where three days later he was killed together with over 40 of his relatives in what the Baghdad official press described as a “spontaneous administration of tribal justice.” Once that was done, Saddam slammed the door shut to any UNSCOM inspection.
FP: So was any Sãrindar plan activated?
Pacepa: Certainly. The minimal version of the Sãrindar plan I made for Libya’s Gaddafi. Soon after I was granted political asylum in the US, Gaddafi staged a fire at the secret chemical weapons facility I knew about (the cellar underneath the Rabta chemical complex). To be sure the CIA satellites would notice that fire and cross that target off its list, he created a huge cloud of black smoke by burning truckloads of tires and painting scorch marks on the facility. That was written in the Sãrindar plan. To be on the safe side, Gaddafi also built a second production facility, this time placed some 100 feet underground in the hollowed-out Tarhunah Mountain, south of Tripoli. That was not in the Sãrindar plan.
FP: It is undeniable, therefore, that Saddam had WMDs, right?
Pacepa: In the early 1970s, the Kremlin established a “socialist division of labor” for persuading the governments of Iraq and Libya to join the terrorist war against the US. KGB chairman Yury Andropov (who would later become the leader of the Soviet Union), told me that either of those two countries could inflict more damage on the Americans than could the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof group and all other terrorist organizations taken together.
The governments of those Arab countries, Andropov explained, not only had inexhaustible financial resources (read: oil), but they also had huge intelligence services that were being run by “our razvedka advisers” and could extend their tentacles to every corner of the earth. There was one major danger, though: by raising terrorism to the state level we risked American reprisal. Washington would never dispatch its airplanes and rockets to exterminate the Baader-Meinhof, but it might well deploy them to destroy a terrorist state. We therefore were also tasked to provide those countries secretly with weapons of mass destruction, because Andropov concluded that the Yankees would never attack a country that could retaliate with such deadly weapons.
Libya was Romania’s main client in that socialist division of labor, because of Ceausescu’s close association with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Moscow kept Iraq.
Andropov told me that, if our Iraq and Libyan experiment proved successful, the same strategy would be extended to Syria. Recently, Libya’s Gaddafi admitted to having WMD, and the CIA inspectors found them. Why should we believe that the almighty Soviet Union, which had proliferated WMD all over the world, was not able to do the same thing in Iraq? Every piece of armament Iraq had came from the former Soviet Union—from the Katyusha launchers to the T72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes. In the spring of 2002, just a couple of weeks after Russia took its place at the NATO table, President Putin and his ex-KGB officers who are now running Russia concluded another $40 billion trade deal with Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime in Iraq. That was not for grain or beans—Russia has to import them from elsewhere.”
Jenny Hatch