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Sunday, April 18, 2004

Time to panic

Not to be alarmist, but someone ought to be alarmed (via Instapundit):
Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al-Qaida bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the nightmare scenario? The one where the terrorists get hold of WMDs and use them against the US and its allies? If these are the missing Iraqi WMDs, this shows that we should have moved sooner, ignored the UN and invaded a year earlier, before Saddam had a chance to send the WMDs off to where they could be used by the terrorists. Whether they are or not, this shows we need to do something about Syria. I thought we could wait. I was pretty sure that Assad would come around, that he might already be negotiating, and King Abdullah at least believes that Assad had no knowledge of this attack, but is he willing and able to deal with the terrorists and their supporters in his own country? Or is he one of those supporters himself? I think that unless he starts showing Libyan-style cooperation, we may have to move against Syria, without the luxury of waiting for Iraq to settle down and the resolution of the November election.

Update: At Letters from Babylon, Jeremy Frank notes that while plenty of other news sources talk about the chemical nature of the planned attack, CNN does not. It's always possible that the chemical part is based on bad intelligence--there have been plenty of other scares that proved false, and I hope this is one--but with a source as high as King Abdullah, you'd think it would be worth reporting.

New Post: Apparently the attempts to break up this plot are still in progress, as discussed above.

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