Captain Ed has ANOTHER great post. He also has some reasonable seculation and asks some daunting questions. Quotable:
One of the reasons that the DoD may have sat on the captured IIS files without translating or releasing them, some speculate, was that the contents may embarrass some of our allies in the overall war on terror. One document released yesterday seems to support that analysis. According to document CMPC-2003-000878, the Russians gave more active support to Saddam prior to the March 2003 invasion than previously known — and they used Syria as a conduit…
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This doesn’t have much to do with WMD, of course, but the revelation of the movement of tank engines — seventy of them for every armored unit — has to raise some eyebrows about the relationship between Washington and Moscow. It also should remind people about the materiel conduit that Syria supplied to Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, and whether or not that conduit operated bidirectionally. Perhaps the WMD that the US seeks did not stay in Syria at all, but made its way to Russia instead.
UPDATE and BUMP: Another look at our friends in Moscow comes in document CMPC-2003-001950, which details a meeting with the Russian ambassador in March 2003. The diplomats discussed the evacuation of Russian citizens from Iraq, but also discussed current American military assets deployed in the Gulf theater[...]
Be sure to check out all the materiel our Russian “allies” gave to Saddam in The Captain’s post.
July 7th, 2006 | Global War On Terror, International Politics, Non-Proliferation