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by Kathleen Parker, Syndicated Columnist
If you thought Democrats and Republicans were politically divided over the war in Iraq, you haven’t seen anything yet. The real political battle apparently is being waged under the radar between the White House, the intelligence community and Congress. At the center of the current skirmish is a newly unclassified document released Wednesday that seems to confirm evidence of WMD in Saddam’s Iraq, including both degraded and possibly lethal chemical agents.
According to the document, coalition forces have recovered some 500 weapons munitions since 2003 that contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agents. Other key points are that these chemical agents could be used outside Iraq and that “most likely munitions remaining are sarin- and mustard-filled projectiles.”
Which is to say, we don’t know what other stores may remain, or where they are, or who else may know about them.
Most significant, perhaps, is the assertion that while agents degrade over time, “chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal,” according to the released document.
In other words, the word “degraded” doesn’t necessarily mean “nothing to worry about.” Moreover, Wednesday’s document is but a small piece of a much larger document that remains classified and that Republican insiders consider “very significant.”…
In a June 5 letter to John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence, [Senator Rick] Santorum (R-PA) urged that these materials be released and hinted that territorial politics seemed to be taking precedence over national security. He wrote:
“While some of this information had been defined as ‘For Official Use Only,’ my staff has learned that many of the captured Iraqi documents have been reclassified and are not to be released until each classified section ‘owned’ by an Agency has been reviewed and cleared for release.”
Only a few with security clearance, Santorum among them, know what is in these various documents. Given the importance of what is suggested here, one can only wonder why the president resists declassifying what can only help the current debate about how to proceed in Iraq.
A new and improved White House maxim might go something like this: Sometimes one has to look back in order to go forward.
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