Chemical weapons in Syria? Just imagine that!

Last week, the world was told that Syria’s President Bashar Assad is poised to use chemical weapons against his own people in a last-ditch effort to retain power despite his growing unpopularity.

Such a maneuver can certainly be classified as insane, because it would have the opposite result of that which is intended. Most likely, the people of Syria in combination with the people of the world would not only depose Assad, but would try him for war crimes as well — should he live that long!

The government of Syria says it would never use chemical weapons against its own people, but we must ask why Assad would even have chemical weapons were he unwilling to use them. Perhaps he thought they would be necessary in a war against Israel — the target of opportunity for Muslim states throughout the region. But since Israel is a known nuclear power, that would be even more insane — and more suicidal — than using the weapons in his own country.

The fact that there is no sane use for chemical weapons does raise the question of why Syria would have ever developed such weapons in the first place. For many years, Syria denied that it even had chemical weapons, but that changed on July 23 of this year, when Assad may have thought it wise to pose a threat that would make the world uncertain whether he was a madman or not!

Which brings us to another madman who liked to play with chemical weapons — Saddam Hussein.

In fact, there has been a story around since 2006 that Syria inherited a large chemical weapons stash from its neighbor Iraq when Hussein tried to rid his country of evidence of WMDs just before the 2003 invasion that toppled him from power.

That story has received blessed little attention over the years in large part because it would have given credence to the claims of the Bush White House that Saddam was a clear and present danger. Since the prevailing narrative among the mainstream media in Washington, D.C., was that Bush had “lied” about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, it would have been highly inconvenient to discover that such weapons had existed after all.

Nonetheless, the evidence is fairly compelling because of its source — retired General George Sada of the Iraqi Air Force. Sada had returned to service at Saddam’s request during the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, but lost favor when he refused orders to execute POWs. That’s a pretty good testament to his character, in my opinion.

After Saddam fell from power in 2003, Gen. Sada was appointed as national security adviser by interim leader Iyad Allawi. During that time, Sada would have been privy to state secrets, and thus his claim in his 2006 book, “Saddam’s Secrets,” that Saddam had smuggled WMDs out of Iraq to Syria certainly deserved at least a full hearing. Instead, it was taken up mostly in narrow conservative circles and widely ignored by the more liberal mainstream press.

Sada described the transport of the deadly weapons in an interview with the New York Sun shortly after the book was published in January 2006:

“There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Sada was quoted as saying. He told the Sun that the weapons were smuggled out on two commercial airliners that were stripped of seating in order to turn them into clandestine cargo planes. Sada said the pilots, who were friends of his from the Iraqi Air Force, told him they flew a total of 56 flights to Syria.

According to the Sun interview, “Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes ... including ‘yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel.’ The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.”

And according to Sada, the weapons were received in Syria by a cousin of none other than President Assad “who is known variously as General Abu Ali, Abu Himma, or Zulhimawe.”

The story was never confirmed, but it should be noted that there was other testimony that such a transfer had occurred. According to the New York Sun, “An article in the Fall 2005 Middle East Quarterly reports that in an appearance on Israel’s Channel 2 on December 23, 2002, Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, stated, ‘Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria.’”

U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, likewise, in 2003 testified before Congress that he was aware of reports that Saddam had transferred WMDs to Syria and that he considered the reports to be a “cause of concern.”

Unfortunately, we may never know whether any of the weapons in the hands of Bashar Assad originated in Iraq. Bolton confirmed the problem in his 2003 testimony when he made it clear that Syria already had “one of the most advanced Arab state chemicals weapons capabilities, including nerve agents sarin and VX.”

That being the case, along with Bolton’s confidence that Syria believed that its chemical weapons capability “serves as a deterrent to regional adversaries,” we are probably going to be left with a mystery, unless the impending collapse of the Syrian government results in a new book called “Assad’s Secrets.”

But that, too, would likely be dismissed as inconclusive or fiction were it to support the claims of the Bush administration. Some things never change.