Did Saddam Give Syria or Iran His Chemical Weapons?

The short answer is "no."

**Why wouldn't he?**

The short answer is that Syria and Iran were allied against Saddam. That is why the U.S. made friends with Saddam in the first place. He hated those pricks even more than we did.

**What’s the long answer?**

Now we’re talking! The long answer can be divided into parts.

1) Like I said, Saddam hated those countries and they hated him. Saddam and the Ayatollah fought for 8 years, with Iran receiving support from the Asaad family. The war had over 1.25 million casualties. We backed Iraq in that war. A few years later, Syrians backed the U.S. in a war against Iraq. The one consistent factor in this seeming hypocrisy is that Saddam hated and feared Asaad and the Ayatollah, and would until his dying day. In fact, Saddam admitted after his defeat that the reason he boasted about having WMDs was to keep Iran and its closest ally at bay.

2) Saddam had nothing to gain by giving away his chemical stockpile in the run-up to the Iraq War. You have to consider the timing of his options. If he had given up the stockpile before the Americans decided to invade, he would have been giving them to his blood-nemeses before he even knew he needed to. If the Americans didn’t come, it would have been inevitable suicide for no gain. If, however, he had given up his stockpile after the Americans were coming, it would still not have saved him. Remember, once the U.S. decided to invade, we told Saddam that the only thing that would stop us was if he surrendered, stepped down from office and turned himself over to stand trial by Iraqi citizens. In other words, he was going to be executed whether he had chemical weapons or not. In fact, that is exactly what happened: we never found chemical weapons, but that didn’t save him from the hangman’s noose. I saw it on video. Keep that in mind: people who ask you to believe that Saddam gave his chemical weapons to Syria or Iran are asking you to believe that he did so for nothing.

3) Neither Syria nor Iran wanted Saddam’s chemical weapons for one reason: if giving over his chemical weapons could have saved Saddam’s life, neither Assad nor the Ayatollah would have taken them. They had wanted him dead for decades Now there we were offering to do it for them and all they had to do was not get involved.

4) Neither Syria nor Iran wanted Saddam’s chemical weapons for another reason. The most powerful military in the world was already waging one open-ended war in their region and we were shouting to the world that we wanted another. Why? Chemical weapons! By the end of that year, even the craziest of the crazy Middle Eastern dictators, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, made a surprise announcement that he would end his WMD program and destroy his chemical stockpiles. That is how little the countries of the Middle East wanted to wind up next on our crusading shit list. Considering our level of surveillance on Iraq as we were gearing up for war, it strains the imagination to imagine either country would risk being caught accepting chemical weapons (which they were already developing on their own) from America’s no. 1 enemy, a sure-fire way to turn a WIN-WIN into a total LOSS.

**That was long. Can you recap that?**

Some of the last bits were educated guesses, but look at it this way:

People who expect you to believe that Saddam gave his chemical stockpile to Syria or Iran during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, expect you to believe that he gave his most powerful weapons to sworn enemies for no advantage without us noticing at a time when they were least likely to accept. They expect you to believe that without a shred of proof. Think about that for a second.

**Why do people think he did?**

Good question. During the latter days of the Iraq-Iran War, Iraq received both consent from the CIA and direct assistance from the Reagan Administration (changing their State classification to allow U.S. companies to sell them chemical reagents) to use chemical weapons against Iran. The reasoning was strategic: Iran had lesser arms but more “soldiers” and had been gaining ground by overwhelming Iraqi troops with bodies. Chemical weapons could take out scores of them easily. It worked, killing thousands of Iranian soldiers and Kurdish guerillas, as well as Iraqi civilians. The last known attack of this nature occurred in 1988. When the “Coalition of the Willing” toppled Saddam’s regime in 2003, the weapons, the primary justification for war, were nowhere to be found.

**What happened to them?**

Much of it, if not all, was destroyed during and after the Gulf War. A combination of American forces, U.N. weapons inspectors and Israeli bombers took care of everything we knew about. We then left a vast surveillance infrastructure in place to make sure anything we didn’t know about never turned up. It is possible that given the decade between the two Iraq Wars, that chemical weapon technology could have been sold in small amounts over time through the black market (likely to North Korea, if anyone), but that is not plausible as a last-minute measure. There is, therefore, no reason to assume that he still had the weapons when the U.S. accused him of having them in 2003.

**Conclusion?**

Anyone who believes Saddam gave his chemical stockpile away right before the U.S. got there has a lot of big questions to answer and contradictions to clear up and no evidence to help them out along the way. The Bush administration tried very hard and came up empty handed.