Popular myths — Lenin called them “useful fictions” — are found across the ideological spectrum, but nowhere are they more prevalent than at the extremes of left and right. For example, many on the far right once insisted that President Eisenhower was a tool of the international communist conspiracy, as claimed by Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. That inspired the great line from Russell Kirk that “Eisenhower isn’t a communist, he’s a golfer.”
More recently, among the most common useful fictions heard on the left and in the mainstream media is the “Bush lied, people died” ditty. President Bush allegedly lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction as a means of deceiving Americans into supporting the war in 2003. Once Hussein was ousted and no WMDs were found, Bush’s deception became obvious, and the “Bush lied, people died” claim passed into the daily vernacular of politically correct discussion of the war in Iraq.
Now comes news the U.S. recently shipped approximately 550 tons of yellowcake natural uranium from Saddam’s former nuclear development site at Tuwaitha in Iraq to a private purchaser in Canada. The Associated Press broke the story and described its significance, saying yellowcake is “the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment.” Removing the stuff “brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions,” the AP reported.
By itself, yellowcake isn’t dangerous unless inhaled by humans, but it is an essential ingredient of the enrichment process in making nuclear weapons. Evidence of enrichment activity was found when Tuwaitha was captured by U.S. forces in 2003. Sadly, The Washington Post used only an online link to the AP story and a 91-word brief on Page A13 of its Sunday edition.
Here’s the key point: As noted in 2004 by The American Thinker, Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, England, said there was no peaceful use in Iraq for the yellowcake because all three of Saddam’s nuclear facilities had been destroyed years before. Once enriched, the 550 tons of yellowcake would be sufficient to produce up to 142 nukes, Dombey calculated. The clear conclusion suggested by these facts is that Saddam was biding his time until United Nations sanctions against his nuclear program were either lifted or he felt sufficiently confident of deceiving U.N. inspectors to begin large-scale enrichment and ultimately nuke production.
This page has been highly critical of Bush on many issues, foreign and domestic. The yellowcake shipment, however, is another reason why we remain convinced history will vindicate Bush’s assessment of Saddam’s intentions and capabilities. We doubt his critics will ever apologize for their extreme invective.
