YES THERE WERE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION....

My Mother died in 1991. She was only 64. Tragically young. We took her ashes back to her hometown of Kidwelly, Wales to be placed in the family plot.

While there, staying at my Cousin’s, a neighbour knocked on the door and said excitedly ‘Gwyneth is back from Iraq!’ We all scuttled up to visit this woman, whom I did not know.

Gwyneth (not her real name) was married to a very high ranking Cabinet Member in Saddam Hussein’s Government. He ran the highly acclaimed Baghdad Hospital. He was not a politician, he was a Doctor. But….he also was a cousin of Saddam and came from Tikrit. She had been allowed to visit Wales to visit family. Her and her children, but not with her husband. Saddam would not let anyone close to him leave the country with family as he knew none would come back.

This is what she told us:

There were WMD. This was September of 1991, shortly after the First Gulf War. Whether they worked or not, was anyone’s guess. She said her husband, as a ranking cabinet member, was in on every big Cabinet meeting. The team in charge of making them told Saddam they were functional and useful and could be employed any time, but they preferred if they had more time to work on them as they hadn’t been perfected. I asked if they were telling the truth and she said no one really knew. If they had said to Saddam Hussein they hadn’t weaponized them yet they would have been killed. Everyone in the Cabinet knew that so no one suggested they weren’t working.

They all were terrified of Saddam.

She told me a story. Her husband came home from a meeting deeply upset. Saddam had said he had been hearing some people didn’t think some of his ideas were perfect. He said he didn’t want to hear backchat. If people had a problem with his ideas the place to bring it up was there, at a Cabinet meeting. He wanted people to speak their minds. He then brought forth one of his latest plans. It was stupid. He asked pointedly if anyone saw any flaws in it. No one said a thing. He then pushed and said he really wanted to know if it weren’t a good plan.

Of course everyone was in a bind. It was an obviously stupid plan, which no one would say as he would be furious. If they say ‘No Boss. It’s great!’ he might be furious. Accordingly, no one said a word. No one spoke. Finally someone sitting directly across from Saddam at the table, hesitatingly offered a very mild critique of the plan. Saddam thanked him for his opinion. He then pulled a pistol from under the table and shot him in the chest. Killed him.

Keep in mind the person he shot would have been a childhood friend, as they all were from Tikrit. And, likely a cousin, as was the Welsh woman’s husband.

Saddam then said ‘Does anyone else have anything they want to say?’ Everyone looked down. He said ‘I don’t want to hear anything more said about me or anything I do from anyone.’

Saddam was a tyrant. A monster.

She said there were WMD, chemical weapons. They were kept in egg cartons in the market place. I was shocked. ‘Egg cartons?’ She said she went to her favourite egg seller at the market and he was frightened and surrounded by armed guards. Later she found his eggs had been replaced with egg cartons filled with canisters of biological weapons. A different egg seller was picked each day.

I asked how the chemical weapons could be stored in such a small space. She pointed around the tiny Welsh living room we were sitting in and said ‘We could fill this living room up with enough poison to kill everyone in Europe’. The chemical weapons were stored in trucks that moved each day. The laboratories in which they were made were the trucks. There was no lab site. At war’s end they were all driven underground into bunkers. No one knew where they were. She said ‘The West will never find them. No one knows where they are.’ I said ‘Well, the drivers, the bunker builders. A lot of people must know where they are.’ She looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘They are all dead.’ Those who built the bunkers were killed. The truck drivers who drove the Chemical stores drove back to Baghdad and were shot. The soldiers who had escorted the trucks to their hiding place were executed.

Saddam spent the war incognito. He travelled in a jeep wearing a Djellaba, and stayed in a different home each night. None of the ‘Saddams’ seen during the Gulf War were him. ‘He’ would appear in different parts of the country hours apart. At first they thought the Allies were onto him. The home where he stayed was always bombed minutes after he left. They thought he had intel and the Allies had intel, and his intel was a bit better. After a week they knew that wasn’t what was happening. He stayed in a different home each night. The next day the family would be killed. The family was always a Christian family, she said.

She said the sons, Uday and Qusay were worse than Saddam. I forget now which one, but one was monstrous beyond humanity. His hobby was to drive around Baghdad until he spotted a beautiful woman. She would be picked up by his guard and taken to one of their palaces. She would be fed and clothed in beautiful clothes. All the guards would leave after warning her what was about to happen. The son would come to the palace and hunt her down, then rape and kill her.

She said everyone in Iraq had loooved George Bush! This shocked me. I asked if she meant the elite intelligentsia? I wondered if the elite wanted Saddam gone and wanted the US to take over. She said no. It was the average every day Iraqi. They loved power. They had been told and believed the two most powerful armies in the world were the Iraq and the Iran armies, who had fought each other viciously for ten years. They had been told the Revolutionary Guard were the most fierce fighters on the planet. The USA demolished them in weeks. This was shocking to them. They love power. The most powerful man on the planet is whom they wanted leading them. Accordingly, they wanted the US and George Bush to run them.

At this point she turned to me and asked somewhat angrily, ‘why did you let the Iraqi Army return to Baghdad? Why didn’t you finish them off when you had the chance?’ I replied, ‘Technically it wasn’t my call, not being in charge and all.’ I said I would have ended them then and there. I asked why? They went on a rampage of terror in Baghdad after they made it back to the City. They killed thousands of their own citizens in order to re-assert their control of the population. They might have been less fierce than the US Army Rangers, but they were still in charge.

I don’t know if anyone remembers the milk factory that was a bomb shelter. Allies bombed it and eight hundred Iraqi citizens were killed. They were in hiding because the air raid sirens had gone off.

All lies.

No one was afraid in Baghdad. US bombing was incredibly precise. You could live across the street from a strategic target and you’d be fine. The air raid sirens were going off daily, but no one feared them as they knew only strategic targets were being hit. After a week people stopped paying attention to them.

The ‘milk factory’ was a milk factory on the surface. But, it went underground eight floors. The bottom floors were all military floors.

The milk factory was quickly evacuated the day it was bombed. Gwyneth said Iraqis had people working for them in all levels of the US military alliance. Trucks came in and everything of importance was removed. The building itself was surrounded by fire trucks. AND EIGHT HUNDRED CITIZENS WERE HERDED IN AT GUNPOINT. These people were whomever had been walking by. They had to be herded in as no citizen thought their government was anything but evil. They knew their individual interests were not protected by anyone in the government. They knew this was not good. They were sent to the bottom of the building, deep underground.

Minutes later a tactical precision bomb was sent down the chimney deep into the building destroying it. At that point the fire trucks filled the building with water. For hours. Hour after hour filling it with water. They then allowed the water to recede and then pulled eight hundred bodies out. Outraged television hosts said the US had messed up. They hadn’t. But, the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein saw an opportunity to get some good publicity. They took it. The fact they had to kill eight hundred of their citizens was no biggie.

She told more stories than this. All equally horrible. Equally inhumane.

The picture she told me though was complicated. The Iraqis hated Saddam. But, they wanted him to rule them. Because he was the toughest Dude on the planet. Only he wasn’t. They would have preferred the US and Bush Sr. UNTIL Bush walked away when he could have killed everyone. This made no sense to them. You have a chance to kill the enemy, you do so. They had believed the US was soft and weak. When they stormed over the Iraq army in weeks they were astounded. Then, when the US backed down after having beaten them, they again disrespected the US. It is a mindset we can’t really understand. I can’t at least.