Well, What Do You Know? Nukes in Iraq

The News & Advance
Published: July 13, 2008

There is nothing — repeat, nothing — that a liberal hates more than to be confronted by the truth.

The smart liberal (and there are few) will immediately begin changing his position, slithering away from past beliefs, now discredited by the facts. An example would be Sen. Barack Obama who, when confronted by evidence on the ground in Iraq that the nation is stabilizing, immediately began modifying his pledge that the troops would begin to come home the minute he takes the presidential oath.

The reaction of most liberals when the truth hits them like a ton of bricks is simply to ignore it.

Case in point: the successful removal of 550 metric tons of yellowcake — high-grade radioactive material used in nuclear enrichment programs — from Saddam Hussein’s Tuwaitha nuclear research facility.

Last week, The Associated Press broke the story as the last of the material arrived in Canada at a facility of Cameco Corp. where it will eventually be used to produce electric power. The United States brokered the Iraqi government’s sale of the yellowcake to Cameco and provided the extraordinary security surrounding the transfer of the material to Canada.

According to the AP, the negotiations lasted more than a year, occurring behind a thick veil of secrecy out of fears that terrorist groups would try to get their hands on the material. Once the deal was signed, the 3,500 barrels had to be transported by road to Baghdad, flown to the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and then taken aboard a U.S.-flagged ship for an 8,500-mile voyage to Montreal.

The Iraqi government, the U.S. military and a slew of international diplomats worked feverishly — and successfully, we’d like to point out — to get the yellowcake out of the country and away from those who would have loved to get their hands on it.

(In the 1990s, Washington had brokered a similar deal with Moscow to spirit weapons-grade uranium out of the former Soviet republics to America.)

Think back to late 2002 and early 2003 and the months prior to the March toppling of Saddam Hussein’s murderous regime. Virtually every major Western nation — France, Germany, Russia, China — believed the dictator possessed WMD (weapons of mass destruction), but only America and Great Britain insisted that the situation had to be strongly addressed, after years of the United Nations’ dithering. Then there were reports that Saddam’s agents had been in the African nation of Niger trying to buy yellowcake; CIA employee Valerie Plame claimed Bush administration officials “outed” her after her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, purportedly found no evidence of such a buying trip.

The facility at Tuwaitha had a storied past and was the target of a daring Israeli air force bombing raid in 1981 that heavily damaged Saddam’s weapons program. The 23,000-acre complex at Tuwaitha is filled with bunkers, research facilities and storage sites; experts say it will take years to completely clean up Tuwaitha and other sites across the country.

Who’s to say what else from Saddam’s toy box have been found, but are still cloaked behind the veil of secrecy and security?

The full story of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program and his “ambitions” for the region may never come to light; true secrets have a way of staying secret. What this episode shows us is that the regime headed by this man desired to cause havoc in the world and possessed the means to do so.

And that, folks, is fact.