History will be the judge

By Dennis Lamb

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Relaxed and self-confident, George W. Bush told CNN's John King in an interview during the recent opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum that “History will ultimately judge the decisions that were made for Iraq … I'm a content man.”

In assessing the decisions President Bush made for Iraq, however, historians should take a closer look at the defection to Jordan on Aug. 8, 1995, of Saddam Hussein's cousin and son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel al Majid, and the latter's brother, Saddam Kamel al-Majid. With them, they brought crates of secret documents on Iraq's past weapons programs.

When Hussein Kamel defected, he was regarded as the regime's number two man.

Several factors probably motivated Hussein Kamel to defect: Deep hatred of Saddam Hussein's son Uday; disagreements on foreign policy with Saddam; concern over the decline of Iraq; fear for his life; and the naive notion that he could gain American and British support to overthrow Saddam and replace him as president.

Hussein Kamel provided incredibly useful information to the CIA and to the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams assigned to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including the revelation that Iraq had a biological warfare program before the Gulf War, the locations for facilities and huge amounts of documents.

Notably, Hussein Kamel stated that he personally ordered all Iraq's biological, chemical, missile and nuclear weapons destroyed in 1991 after the end of the first Gulf War and that all had been destroyed. All that remained were blueprints, computer disks, microfiches and production molds that Saddam Hussein had hidden in hope of being able to resume production once sanctions were lifted and inspections ended.

Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel returned to Iraq on February 23, 1996, after Saddam Hussein had assured them that all would be forgiven. Cold shouldered by Jordan, the Iraqi opposition, other Arab countries and the U.S., he apparently felt he had no other choice.

If there were any concerns that Hussein Kamel's defection was part of a deception operation by Saddam Hussein to mislead the world into believing that all his WMD had been destroyed so he could get sanctions lifted, such doubts should have ended when the regime quickly turned over new material, invited inspectors to visit previously unknown facilities, and had not only Hussein Kamel and his brother killed when they returned to Iraq but also their father, a third brother, and a woman.

Hussein Kamel's 1995 revelations about Iraq's WMD having been destroyed in 1991 were not made public for another seven years. Newsweek first surfaced them in a Feb. 24, 2003 report on its website, titled “The Defector's Secrets.” It said that Kamel's revelations were “hushed up” because inspectors “hoped to bluff the Iraqi dictator into revealing still more.” This was only days before our March 19, 2003, attack on Iraq and no other news media picked up the story.

Shortly before we invaded Iraq, UNMOVIC (which had superseded UNSCOM) declared that UNSCOM had successfully dismantled Iraq's unconventional weapons program during the 1990s. The IAEA's head, Han Blix, accused the U.S. government of dramatizing the threat of WMD in Iraq in order to strengthen the case to invade. Former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter, an American citizen, vociferously protested that Iraq had no WMD and invading would be a disaster.

It appears, then, that President Bush invaded Iraq, not because he feared Iraq had WMD, but because he knew it did not. This point almost certainly is why North Korea restarted its nuclear weapons program shortly before we invaded Iraq and Iran appears to want a nuclear weapon.

Bush 43's war to remove Saddam Hussein opened the Middle East to al-Qaida, gave the Taliban time to reorganize, strengthened Iran's position and almost caused our economic collapse.

Historians will have much to look at in ranking Bush 43 among America's past presidents. In the meantime, we should never again let the military-industrial complex and hawkish politicians “sleepwalk” us into another war in the Middle East.

Dennis Lamb, formerly of Chelsea, retired from the CIA in 2002 after serving 30 years in its Directorate of Operations as a case officer and intelligence analyst. Comments: lambden@hotmail.com