Israelis hold firm: Saddam had WMD

Two wrongs don't make a right
(All emphasis ours)

No weapons of mass destruction? Says who? The Bush administration's claim relied heavily on Israeli intelligence, but United States forces botched the hunt.

"It is true that much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong," U.S. President George W. Bush said last week, prior to Thursday's parliamentary elections in Iraq, thus aligning himself with what America has considered an indisputable fact for some time now: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush believes that the offensive was justified despite this mistake.

The debate on this question is only beginning, but he already closed the argument about the intelligence failure: "As president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. And I'm also responsible for fixing what went wrong by reforming our intelligence capabilities. And we're doing just that."

And here is what he said about other intelligence services, including those of Israel: "When we made the decision to go into Iraq, many intelligence agencies around the world judged that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction." Indeed, many top intelligence and army officials in Israel still insist: "We said this at the time and we were not mistaken. The Americans are the ones who are making the mistake now."

Here is an interesting version that does not worry the public in Israel, in the absence of a public debate over the war in Iraq. These senior officials, who are intimately familiar with Israeli intelligence material, still believe that Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction. Not nuclear weapons, of course. Israel never made this claim. The Americans indeed erred in inflating the insubstantial information on nuclear plans. But there were chemical and biological weapons. And if the Americans have decided otherwise, especially for political reasons, they are now making a second error on top of the first error.

Some of these officials have shared their views with their American contacts. "Why didn't we find the weaponry?" the Americans asked. The Israelis told them politely: because most of it was transferred to Syria before the war. Such suspicions have been openly published. All the intelligence services in the West are familiar with photographs of trucks sneaking across the border at night, accompanied by senior Iraqi officers. The problem is that the moment Israel turns an accusatory finger toward Syria, it is immediately suspected of ulterior, political motives.

"They can think whatever they want," an Israeli officer says. "Perhaps it is impossible to change their opinion, but it is also impossible to change the truth. Material was transferred to Syria in the dark of the night, on the very eve of the war. Therefore, the Americans did not find it." And this, as suggested above, is the more polite explanation.

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WMD to Syria? You know who's responsible for this claim (and Astroturf!): the Jews!