Thanks to Withdrawal, Iraq Nuclear Nightmare Returns

 

IBDEditorials.com

WMD: So the U.S. pulls out of Iraq and an al-Qaida-tied group moves in and gets hold of nuclear material. Maybe the "Bush lied" crowd should put some of that depleted uranium in their pipes and smoke it.

Iraq's UN ambassador this week disclosed that nearly 90 pounds of low-grade uranium compounds stored at a Mosul university was seized by Sunni terrorists who invaded last month.

Whether the new al-Qaida-linked state in Syria and Iraq can build a dirty bomb from it, jihadists who want to plot a nuclear 9/11 now know where the action is.

The potential threat from theft was immediately downplayed in the media. But House Homeland Security counter-terrorism subcommittee chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., isn't convinced it's harmless.

King told Fox News' Megyn Kelly, that despite "the fact that the government or the administration is trying to pass this off as not being enriched and perhaps not being weapons grade, the fact is it still could be used for a dirty bomb."

Indeed, this is truly a nightmare scenario.

President Obama sold the American people on the notion that he would bring peace to Iraq; that with Osama bin Laden dead, al-Qaida was on the run; and that Iraq and al-Qaida had nothing to do with one another.

Now the Obama-engineered power vacuum in the Mideast has brought the world possibly the greatest Islamist terrorist threat since 9/11: a new Shariah-law state dedicated to launching major acts of terrorism, with nuclear-weapon ambitions like al-Qaida, from which it splintered.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of al-Qaida, "The Looming Tower," Lawrence Wright describes the lead-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when — after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole less than a year earlier — "al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan filled with new recruits, and contributors from the Gulf states arrived carrying Samsonite suitcases filled with petrodollars, as in the glory days of the Afghan jihad."

Wright chronicled how al-Qaida recruits attracted to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan were well-educated jihad seekers who saw where the base to be trained for successful operations was.

Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School and a senior nuclear weapons adviser to President Clinton, is alarmed. He says the new Iraq/Syria caliphate's theft of the uranium means that "Like the Taliban's Afghanistan before 9/11, the Islamic State may become a safe haven for people from other groups and countries to train and plot complex attacks."

Bunn warned that the new Islamic State "has made clear that its ambitions are global." It has also declared itself to be the caliphate promised by Allah, through which "the sun of jihad has risen," explicitly inviting terrorists the world over to travel to Iraq and join them.

Bunn warned: "Having such a haven where the government is not going to interfere makes a huge difference in terrorists' ability to put together a really complicated plot — from something like 9/11 to a plot to make a nuclear bomb."

He's dead right. Iran and this new nightmarish state are now twin threats of eventual nuclear terrorism.