PNAC ON IRAQ, WMD & BUSH

Mel67 on Big Brass Alliance found a PNAC paper dated April 2005 that attempts to provide support for Bush and the Iraq War. This is the Link to the paper.

I downloaded and read through some of it and I decided to start checking the claims.

In the Preface, page i, it states:

Although American inspection teams led by David Kay and Charles Duelfer have concluded that most have been destroyed, this is based principally on interviews with former officials of the Saddam regime involved in the programs. (1 )

In the footnote (1), it further claims that:

As Duelfer reports, the ISG’s understanding of what happened to Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons is “heavily dependent” on information provided by one man, Dr. Mahmud Firaj Bilal, the Iraqi scientist who claims to have supervised the destruction. This reliance on one source is, as Duelfer acknowledges, “a weakness in our analysis.” For while Duelfer and his colleagues believe they obtained “a reasonably coherent account of the disposition of chemical weapons munitions” by interviewing Dr. Bilal and other former Iraqi officials, the ISG was “not able physically to verify that story.”

Now, let's take a look at what immediately follows "to verify that story" in Volume 3 of Duelfer's report, page 32:

The UN has, however, verified some of it.
• Iraq likely destroyed all 20 concealed CW Al
Husayn missile warheads in the summer of 1991,
according to Dr. Bilal based on UN-sponsored
excavations. All were “binary” GB/GF nerve agent
warheads fi lled with a mixture of isopropanol
and cyclohexanol and MPF.
• Al Muthanna had dispersed approximately 1024
CW R-400 bombs along various Iraqi airbases. Iraq
did not declare some of these to the UN and unilaterally destroyed them in situ. The UN holds these as accounted for, although they were unaware that a small percentage of them were used on the Shia in March 1991 according to multiple sources.
• Iraq disposed of 1.5 tons of spoiled bulk VX nerve agent at the Al Muthanna State Establishment dumpsite.
• Dr. Bilal also stated that Iraq destroyed the following
chemical agent precursors:
—157 tons of the VX precursor phosphorus pentasulfi
de (P2S5) destroyed by mixing it with soil at
Saqlawiyah, northwest of Fallujah. UNSCOM sponsored
excavations accounted for about this amount.
—55 tons of the VX precursor choline destroyed at
Qasr al-‘ashiq near Samarra’.
—10 tons of the mustard precursor thiodiglycol
destroyed by burning at Saqlawiyah. This precursor
was never declared to the UN and had been stored in the city
of Samarra’. When the rest of the unilateral destruction took place, no one remembered this stock until a month after the rest of the chemical destruction. This realization triggered its destruction.
—Al Muthanna State Establishment gave cyclohexanol, isopropanol, and isopropylamine to various industries for use as solvents.
• Iraq also destroyed a quantity of empty aerial
bombs intended for CW use and empty 122-mm
CW rockets.
• Bilal insisted that Iraq’s CW “Full, Final, and Complete
Declaration” is completely accurate regarding
the unilateral destruction of CW munitions.
.
.
.

The destruction years ago of the bulk of Iraq’s
CW munitions not withstanding, ISG remains concerned
about the status and whereabouts of hundreds of
CW artillery rounds.

These are 550 rounds of mustard gas. (Vol. 3, p. 33) The problems the ISG had with trying to find these were the lack of security in Iraq, looting of weapons caches and destruction as a direct result of the invasion. (Vol, 3, p. 34)

So, there was good evidence to support the claims of Dr. Bilal and the inability to check further can be blamed on the failure of the Bush Administration to provide enough troops to secure the country, especially the weapons caches, during and after the war.