Keep focus on Iraq's lies about bioweapons

One of the reasons the Bush administration has targeted Iraq in the war on terrorism is the fact that Saddam Hussein's regime has actively sought to create weapons of bioterrorism that could be unleashed on U.S. targets or anywhere else in the world.

Opponents to a military strike against Iraq are dredging up any arguments they can find to prove their case. Included is a well-targeted reminder that during the 1980s the United States supplied the very ingredients used by Baghdad to create its bioweapons.

U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd confronted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the germ transfers at a recent hearing held by the Armed Services Committee.

"Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?" asked Byrd, referring to a Newsweek magazine article on the transfers.

"I have no knowledge of it whatsoever," replied Rumsfeld, "and I doubt it."

Byrd, Rumsfeld and Newsweek all have short memories. The transfers of deadly germ samples from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from Virginia-based American Type Culture Collection were well-documented in 1994 during Senate committee hearings and in a follow-up letter in 1995 from the CDC to the Senate.

At the time of the germ transfers, the United States was nominally an ally of Iraq in that nation's war with Iran. Iraq claimed it needed the samples to conduct medical research that would lead to vaccines that could be used to protect the Iraqi people in the event of a bioweapons attack by Iran.

Among the toxins sent to Iraq were samples of anthrax, botulinum toxin and toxoid used to make vaccines, germs that cause gas gangrene and the West Nile virus.

A former U.N. weapons inspector says it was naive of the United States to believe Iraq intended to use the samples for legitimate medical research. He may be right.

But all of this recent history doesn't change the fact that Iraq obtained, under false pretenses, key items to be used to create deadly weapons that would likely infect large numbers of people far beyond whatever target Iraq might choose.

Some politicians like Byrd would like for the nation and the world to focus on the questionable germ shipments to Iraq in the 1980s.

The real focus should be locked on what use Iraq made of those samples. Saddam Hussein's regime has admitted to the United Nations that it made weapons out of those germs.

This is the same United Nations that is reluctant to uphold its many sanctions against Iraq and believes Saddam Hussein when he says his new open-door policy for U.N. weapons inspectors is credible.