In an earlier column we pointed out that the regime of Saddam Hussein did indeed possess the so-called “WMD” prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (by “WMD” we mean chemical and biological weapons; as far as we know, Saddam never possessed nuclear weapons, thanks to Israel’s successful air strike against his nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981).

It was necessary to remind people of this fact because many people have claimed that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not prompted by any actual threat to American national security, and/or that its sole purposes were to place Iraqi oil under U.S. control, or to please Israel and a “cabal” of “neoconservative” Jewish officials in the U.S. government who were loyal to Israel and not the United States.

These claims are not true. Saddam did have access to biological and chemical weapons; he had terrorists in his employ (for example, the notorious Abu Nidal), who were probably capable of delivering them by stealth to targets in the United States; and he hated the United States, perhaps with good reason from his own point of view. The United States, after all, had thwarted his seizure of Kuwait, had spearheaded the international sanctions against his regime, had enforced a “no fly zone” on his air force over parts of Iraqi territory, had occasionally bombed his military installations between 1991 and 2003, and had thereby thwarted his objective of annihilating the Kurdish people within Iraq’s borders. Saddam thus had the means and the motives to attack the United States with deadly weapons. And imperfect American internal security measures might well have given him the opportunity.

Before 2003, Saddam might have been compared to an “unexploded ordinance”--a bomb or an artillery shell that had not exploded on impact, but which continues to lie on the ground, where it might not explode for years or decades, but on the other hand, might also go off at any time and might kill or maim innocent people. Obviously, the security of the populated area where the bomb or shell has fallen requires that it be disarmed and removed. However, the disarmament and disposal of unexploded ordinance is an extremely delicate and dangerous mission that often blows up in the faces of even the most expert “bomb squad” and results in the death of brave men and women.

At the same time, we recognize that merely pointing out that the invasion of Iraq did aim at removing a real threat to the safety of the American people is not enough to make Americans feel comfortable or happy about what has been happening there for the past four years.

U.S. forces did accomplish one of their missions: they captured Saddam Hussein, who was eventually executed, after a reasonably fair trial, by an elected Iraqi government. Another goal was accomplished when his dreadful sons Husay and Qusay, as bloodthirsty as their father, were killed by U.S. troops, thus removing the appalling prospect of a Saddam dynasty.

The other objectives of the U.S. invasion, however, have not been achieved. The biological and chemical weapons were never found or destroyed. An official U.S. government investigating team accepted the claims of Iraqi scientists whom they interrogated, who claimed that the weapons had been destroyed or allowed to “degrade” (lose their potency because of lack of “servicing”). But since Saddam was no humanitarian and had possible uses for these weapons (he actually had used chemical weapons against the Iranians and the Kurds in the 1980s, killing around 5,000 Kurds with them in the town of Halabja), this explanation, although accepted by the U.S. government, seems unlikely to us.

More credible is the claim of a former Iraqi general, Georges Sada, which we mentioned in our earlier column, that the weapons were sent across the border into neighboring Syria shortly before or after the beginning of the U.S. invasion. Another Iraqi official told American and French intelligence agents that Saddam had entrusted the chemical and biological weapons to several Sunni Arab tribal chiefs in the “Sunni Triangle” region, close to his native town and power base, Tikrit.

Neither of these possibilities is reassuring from the point of view of American security. The Syrian regime of Bashar Assad is hostile to the United States. And it has close ties to several militantly anti-American terrorist groups, such as Hizballah, which killed over 260 Americans and kidnapped and held hostage hundreds of others in the 1980s, the recently formed Fatah al-Islam, which openly supports al-Qaida, and the Popular Front for Palestine-General Command, led by the notoriously brutal terrorist Ahmed Jibril. If it is true that Sunni tribal sheiks in Iraq control some of these weapons, they could easily fall into the hands of the numerous Islamist terrorist factions, which operate in the Sunni Triangle, or into those of the remaining Ba’athist military, police, and intelligence apparatuses, which are still very active in this area.

Nor has the Iraq war eliminated the danger that Iraq could be used as future base for terrorist attacks on the United States. While Saddam probably harbored some Islamist terrorists in Iraq prior to the American invasion, their numbers have grown enormously since then, as the fall of the Saddam regime created a power vacuum, and the thinly spread-out American forces, with little knowledge of Iraqi culture and few soldiers who could even speak the vernacular Arabic, failed to fill this vacuum. Sunni Arab terrorists have poured in across the Syrian border into the Sunni Triangle from all over the Arab world, but especially from America’s supposed “friend,” Saudi Arabia, which has done nothing to stop the influx.

Iran has also poured its own agents across its border with the Shi’ite areas of eastern Iraq, where they have armed and equipped large Shi’ite terrorist militias, such as the Imam al-Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. Certainly if American forces withdraw, Iraq could easily become a base and staging area for terrorist attacks on the United States by either the Sunni or the Shi’ite organizations.

Although the United States occupation forces did preside over a reasonably free and fair election in Iraq, they have not succeeded in establishing democracy in the country as our government had hoped. The elected government has little real power, which remains in the hands of armed militias and terrorist factions who could not care less what elected civilian politicians may wish or attempt to decide. In any case, the political parties brought to power by the American-sponsored election are dominated by Shi’ite clergymen with little real interest in democracy and no friendly feelings for the United States or the Western world--even though they have been happy to use American-enabled elections as a means of grabbing some power for themselves.

Most disturbing of all, the Iraq invasion has not given Americans any protection from possible chemical, biological, or nuclear attack from several other countries that are hostile to the United States. Syria has large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of its own, even without the addition of the Iraqi weapons. It also has medium range missiles that could be used to deliver them to parts of Europe or, placed on ships, which could aim them at the United States. The terrorists connected with Syria could also deliver these weapons.

Iran also has large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and it is rapidly developing nuclear weapons production facilities. It has missiles that can hit targets up to a thousand miles from its frontiers, and is in the process of developing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that can reach American territory. It also has a close relationship with Hizballah and other terrorist organizations, and its government has openly vowed to destroy the United States.

North Korea, another extremely hostile state, has chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and intercontinental ballistic missiles with which to deliver them. It also possesses a terrorist strike force which has from time to time made devastating attacks on South Korean civilian targets, including civilian aircraft, and which could also be used to strike at Americans.

The Iraq invasion has done nothing to prevent our arch-enemies, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, from entrenching themselves in the northern “frontier” area of Pakistan, with at least the tacit consent of the Pakistani government, another supposed “friend” of the United States. The Pakistanis have repaid the over one billion dollars a year in aid that we have been giving them since 9/11 by playing host to both al-Qaida and their close allies, the Taliban, who have been staging a major resurgence in Afghanistan, five years after American troops supposedly liberated that hapless country from Taliban-al-Qaida domination. And American intelligence sources report that al-Qaida has been successfully rebuilding its terrorist apparatus from its now-secure Pakistani base, after some initial reverses at the hands of the U.S. military and intelligence services after 9/11.

Al-Zawahiri has publicly asserted that al-Qaida has nuclear weapons. Reports in the usually well-informed World Net Daily indicate that it has chemical and biological weapons as well, developed for it by Pakistani scientists. And it is an undisputed fact that at the time of his arrest by American authorities, al-Qaida’s mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, was sharing a house with a Pakistani scientist who specializes in biological warfare agents.

Of course, America’s old Cold War adversaries, Russia and China, have vast quantities of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and thousands of “platforms,” including ICBMs and long-range bombers, which can deliver them to the United States within a matter of minutes. Despite the superficial appearance of peace, America’s relations with both Russia’s and China’s governments remain strained and uneasy.

For example, Russia recently resumed regular bomber patrols over the Atlantic Ocean after having suspended them for the past fifteen years. Russian agents are likely to have been involved in the grisly murder of a Russian dissident in Britain that used radioactive chemicals as a murder weapon--a rather heavy-handed warning to the West.

In some ways, the heavy American involvement in Iraq may actually have increased our vulnerability to attack by other unfriendly countries and organizations, by tying down so many of our soldiers, weaponry, and intelligence resources that are badly needed to protect the American people from them. The drastically understaffed American military can not now put enough soldiers in Afghanistan to prevent the resurgence of the Taliban there, which threatens to turn that country once again into an al-Qaida base.

And it is extremely difficult and risky now for the United States to bomb Iran’s nuclear production facilities, because the large number of pro-Iranian terrorists in Iraq, as well as the large number of Iranian agents who have infiltrated into Iraq could retaliate with massive attacks on our soldiers in Iraq. In effect, our soldiers there are being held hostage by Iran.

However painful it is for someone who once had great hopes that the U.S. invasion of Iraq would help to protect Americans from hostile forces in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and that it might help to strengthen the forces of democracy, reason, the rule of law, and modernization in them, we are forced to admit that it has failed miserably to achieve either of these objectives. Why did things go so terribly wrong? And what is more important, what can be done to put them right? We have no simple or part answer to either of these extremely difficult and painful questions, any more than does anyone else. But, we will try to grapple them as best we can in our next column.