How Did Syria Acquire Massive Stockpiles of WMD?
Reuters recently posted an article saying that it may take tens of thousands of troops to secure Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons. It quoted one U.S. official who said there were possibly dozens of chemical and biological weapons sites scattered around Syria.
Everyone knows, it seems, that Syria has a deadly arsenal of chemical weapons, but almost no one is curious about how Syria managed to obtain these weapons. Back in 2003, you might recall that after American troops failed to locate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the mainstream media had a field day.
Prior to that time, experts, security officials, United Nations inspectors and media elites were in unanimous agreement: Saddam had wmd, he had used them several times, and he had the means to continue building more. But the left-wing media didn’t seem to care about Saddam’s brutal track record. All that mattered was that a Republican president got it all wrong, supposedly.
Yet not long after that, we read about a massive chemical weapons attack was narrowly averted in, of all places, Jordan! Despite the large-scale nature of this would-be attack, media coverage was scant.
At the time Jordanian authorities said the weapons came from Syria. This was in 2004. At that same time, theTrumpet.com took it a step further. My father asked in an article back in 2004, “Have some of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction been found in Jordan?”
There had been, after all, several reports in 2003 of significant truck movement between Iraq and Syria just prior to the U.S. invasion. Additional evidence from seized Iraqi documents during the war indicated that Iraq received assistance from Russia in transporting weapons and missile components across the border to Syria. Even one of Saddam’s former generals said he was “absolutely certain” wmd were transferred to Syria just before the war started in 2003.
Today, with Syria engulfed in civil war and Bashar Assad’s regime teetering in the balance, there is an understandable degree of panic about what might happen to Syria’s chemical weapons in the event of a regime change.
Hardly anyone, though, has bothered to ask about how Syria managed to acquire such a massive stockpile of chemical weapons in the first place. Syria’s short-lived nuclear weapons program was obliterated by an Israeli airstrike in 2007. It hasn’t used wmd on its own people like Saddam did. And it certainly hasn’t had the reputation for being a large-scale manufacturer of wmd. Not like Iraq did before 2003.
And yet last month, when Assad’s government acknowledged that it possessed a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, no one doubted the claim. There were no intelligence reports theorizing that Syria suspended its wmd program years ago—or saying that the stockpiles simply did not exist.
Everyone knows they exist. But no one asks how they got there—because raising that question would expose the media’s shameful record of bias and deception.
