It was very interesting that NATO, the Obama Administration, and our intelligence agencies made no mention of WMD when they decided to put in a no-fly zone to prevent Kadhafi from using his aerial assets against the protesters. It’s not that we didn’t know that Qaddafi had lots of WMD, as it has been written about in several books I’ve read, and the information goes back several decades, it wasn’t actually a secret.
Indeed, there was an interesting article and war report recently in Space War Online News titled; “Hundreds of weapons stockpiles still in Libya: UN,” by Staff Writers at the United Nations, published on October 26, 2011. The article stated;
“NATO, and UN inspectors have visited 100s of weapons stockpiles in Libya. Martin, head of the UN mission in Libya, told a Security Council meeting that new previously undeclared sites for storing chemical weapons had been uncovered since the fall of Kadhafi’s government, 2-unguarded sites contained surface-to-air missiles, tank and mortar rounds, large numbers of munitions and thousands of guided and unguided aerial weapons. One site had already been looted, civilians and armed fighters arrived with pickup trucks to remove more weapons.”
So where did all these WMDs come from you ask? Some say, at least some of these WMD stockpiles were old Saddam Weapons, which left right before the fall of Baghdad using a Russian convoy, which eventually made their way to Libya. When President Bush threatens Gaddafi, he didn’t want to end up like Saddam, promised to come clean, and give up his nuclear weapons ambitions, he even promised to stop stockpiling WMD, and close all the factories.
Many people don’t give President Bush the credit he deserves for playing hardball with Gaddafi during those years, but that is one battle he had one without firing a single shot, and he should be commended for that. Of course, Gaddafi was not above board on all of his promises, and he hid some of those WMDs, which I believe our intelligence agencies did know about, and choose not to mention because the whole WMD issue with Iraq would not have played well during the Libyan Civil War.
Still, another question remains what happened to all of the other weapons which were stockpiled by Gaddafi, and how many of those made it into Sub-Sahara Africa, or got into the hands of Islamic radical organizations such as Al Qaeda? We won’t know for quite a while, but if it’s true that some of those shoulder launched surface-to-air missiles got into the hands of terrorists, you can bet that there may be some downed airliners in the future. Perhaps Gaddafi’s legacy has yet to speak from the grave. I hope not, but it is something that I fear.
