Wall Street Journal: 'Turn Toward Iraq' Has Been Made

Wall Street Journal: 'Turn Toward Iraq' Has Been Made

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax
Monday, June 17, 2002

The Bush administration has decided to attack Iraq and military preparations should be ready within six months, the Wall Street Journal reported in a page one story this weekend.

The paper said despite conflicting and limited intelligence of Iraqi involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, evidence first emerging last October indicates that terrorists have been planning to make and explode a dirty bomb potentially in Washington or New York.

This and other developments have erased any remaining reservations that Iraq must be neutralized in a preemptory strike of some nature.

Delaying the inevitable are only the logistics of preparing and mounting out some 200,000 troops, a task likely to consume about six months. Some in the administration argue that the job can be done more surgically -- but the job will be done, concludes the Journal.

Adding to the inertia to expect an attack on Iraq, the Washington Post reported that the Bush administration has ordered the expulsion of a U.N.-based Iraqi diplomat, charging that he had spied on the United States.

Iraqi diplomat, Abdul Rahman I.K. Saad, has been ordered to leave the country by the end of the month.

"He was spying,” a U.S. official told the Post. "We found sufficient evidence, overwhelming evidence.”

"We have no spies; we are diplomats,” defended Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Douri. "We are working at the United Nations.”

Saad’s dismissal is the first diplomatic move against Iraq since the United States ousted an Iraqi diplomat in 1994.

Douri maintains that Saad is an economist serving on a U.N. committee that deals with economic and social affairs and was not out to recruit U.S. citizens for espionage but rather to lobby against the 11-year-old U.N. embargo on Iraq.

Showdown With Iraq 'Nearly Inevitable'

According to the Wall Street Journal analysis, "a showdown with Iraq appears nearly inevitable."

In tracing the evolution of administration policy on Iraq, the Journal focuses on several salient developments that has moved the administration’s crosshairs over Baghdad.

In late October, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice warns of coming attacks that would, "make Sept. 11 look like child’s play by using some terrible weapon." The most likely provider of that terrible weapon is Iraq, opines Rice.

"[I]t is because Iraq is one of those places that is both hostile to us, and, frankly, irresponsible and cruel enough to make this available," Rice says.

Just weeks ago, Bush admonishes the cadets at West Point, "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

In Germany last month, Bush calls a potential Iraq-al-Qaeda alliance "a threat to civilization itself.”

Compounding the concerns about the two Pakistani atomic scientists that were arrested in October and then released, comes intelligence of yet two other scientists, also veterans of Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons complex. Although the administration remains tight-lipped, analysts profess worry that this new rogue pair has passed nuclear weapons technology to al-Qaeda.

Then comes the theorizing that al-Qaeda has already smuggled a dirty bomb, explosive wrapped with radioactive material, into the country. Last year, the White House informed police in Washington of the dirty-bomb threat.

Percolating in the mix: Czech intelligence officials report that Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi agent in Prague in April 2001.

Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haidari, a concrete contractor, tells U.S. authorities in December that he helped build dozens of Mr. Hussein’s latest weapons labs, and that they were scattered throughout Baghdad underneath homes and mosques. He has work orders to back up his claims.

In Bush’s State of the Union speech in January, he depicts Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil.” Bush warns, "They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.”

In late fall, U.S. troops discover rudimentary designs for nuclear weapons in an al-Qaeda hideout. Although inconclusive, a cache of documents, computers, books and notes demonstrates al-Qaeda’s earnest quest for weapons of mass destruction.

Most recently, Vice President Dick Cheney sallies forth with the fighting words, "A regime that hates America and everything we stand for must never be permitted to threaten America with weapons of mass destruction.”

The Journal concludes that the most specific declaration about the administration’s immediate intentions towards Iraq remains Bush’s pronouncement to reporters in the United Kingdom last April: "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go. That’s about all I’m willing to share with you.”

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