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Christopher Hitchens writes about “The Buried Truth”, a new book by Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist:
It’s a good coincidence that the Duelfer report appears in the same week as The Bomb In My Garden, a memoir by Saddam Hussein’s chief nuclear physicist. Between them, or taken together, the two bodies of evidence enable two quite different yet quite compatible conclusions. The first is that the Saddam regime was more disarmed than perhaps even its leadership knew. The second is that it would have been very unwise to proceed on any assumption except that of its latent danger.
....Apart from its insight into the workings of the Saddam nuclear project, it provides a haunting account of the atmosphere of sheer evil that permeated every crevice of Iraqi life under the old regime. It is morally impossible to read it and not rejoice at that system’s ignominious and long-overdue removal.
Dr. Obeidi was “interviewed” by many inspectors in the run-up to last year’s war under the same conditions of open blackmail that Saddam had imposed on all his other scientists, and they got no nearer finding out the truth than one would have expected.
Having been forcibly recruited, with his family as hostage, into the Saddam nuclear program, Obeidi describes the hysterical pressure exerted by the crime family that ran Iraq. Almost weeping with fear, scientists were lashed into prostituting their skills in the rush for a usable nuke.
...The subsequent arrival of the inspectors meant that Saddam, despite elaborate deceptions and dummyings (very well-described by Obeidi) was never able to get back up to speed again. His regime also began to suffer from interclan warfare with the defection of the Kamel brothers to Jordan and the further exposure of the Baathist arms racket. However, there was a secret that the Kamel brothers were not able to betray. Under the orders of Qusai Hussein, Dr. Obeidi had buried a huge barrel in his back garden. The barrel contained Iraq’s crowning achievement in perverted physics: the components of an actual centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium. It also contained all the hard-won printed instructions and expertise on the subject. Dr. Obeidi was “interviewed” by many inspectors in the run-up to last year’s war under the same conditions of open blackmail that Saddam had imposed on all his other scientists, and they got no nearer finding out the truth than one would have expected.
His conclusion is that, given an improvement in the economic and political climate, Saddam could and would have done one of two things: reconstitute the program or share it with others. ...We know from the Kay report that, as late as March of last year, Saddam’s envoys were meeting North Korea’s team in Damascus and trying to buy missiles off the shelf. It would never have stopped: this ceaseless ambition to acquire the means of genocide. If anything, we underestimated that aspect of it.
But to John Kerry, all that’s just a nuisance. Let’s get back to the days, says Kerry, when we regarded all that as just a nuisance. Kerry’s strategy: 1) Find sand. 2) Stick head in it. 3) Get nuked. 4) Blame somebody. Thanks, Senator, but no thanks. Sell that snake oil somewhere else.
Conclusion (as I’ve noted before ): if a nation is trying to get you nuked, and your president regards that as a nuisance, you are in big trouble.
Update. See also these articles regarding Kerry’s “nuisance” speech:
Kerry Calls Terrorists ‘a Nuisance’—And What Bush Can Do To Appeal To Skittish Dems
Kerry’s Nuisance Approach to Terrorists, Wrongly Assumes that No Nations Support Them.
