Far from being an isolated incident, yesterday's discovery in Iraq of an artillery shell filled with sarin gas is just the tip of the iceberg of recently uncovered evidence that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction program that was fully operational until the U.S. invaded in March 2003.
Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. inspectors have found within the last few months "warehouses full of commercial and agricultural chemicals," which, if mixed and packaged properly, "could quickly become chemical weapons."
U.S. forces in Karbala have also recently uncovered 55-gallon drums loaded with chemicals that were said to be "pesticide," some of which were stored in what military sources described as a "camouflaged bunker complex."
Why camouflage insect spray?
The alleged agricultural site just happened to be located alongside a military ammunition dump, reports Insight magazine.
According to the Journal, Iraq Survey Group head Charles Duelfer recently told Congress that some of Saddam's WMD facilities were newly built and contained "stockpiled" raw materials that would have allowed him to "produce such weapons on a moment's notice."
There's more.
In early April, Jordanian authorities foiled an al-Qaida plot to kill 80,000 people in a chemical weapons attack in Amman.
According to one of the conspirators, whose confession was broadcast on Jordanian TV, al-Qaida WMD specialist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who reportedly was last seen in a chilling video beheading Nick Berg, trained and outfitted the WMD attackers in pre-war Iraq.
Like notorious terrorists Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas, Zarqawi enjoyed sanctuary in Baghdad, courtesy of Saddam.
Jordanian TV coverage of the Zarqawi plot included video footage of hundreds of gallon jugs containing chemical weapons that had been intercepted 75 miles from the Syriian border, where much of Saddam's pre-war WMD stockpile is believed to have been hidden.
The Zarqawi revelation comes on the heels of the April 26 explosion at a suspected chemical weapons factory in Baghdad, just as a U.S. weapons team arrived to inspect its contents.
Disguised as a "perfume factory," the facility was booby-trapped, investigators believe, to destroy evidence of whatever was inside.
We won't be surprised if, in the coming weeks, more sarin-laden shells are uncovered in Iraq. But in the meantime, the media focus on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has obscured that fact that the WMD case against Saddam is already compelling and continues to grow.
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