Huckabee Claims Iraq WMD Were Hidden Like "Easter Eggs"

Posted by Faiz Shakir, Think Progress at 12:09 PM on January 25, 2008.

During the Republican presidential debate last night, Mike Huckabee suggested that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, but that they were moved prior to the war. In making this observation, Huckabee compared Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to an Easter egg hunt:

Everybody can look back and say, oh well we didn't find the weapons. Doesn't meet that they weren't there. Just because you didn't find every Easter egg didn't mean it wasn't planted.

Chris Matthews pressed Huckabee on this point in an interview after the debate. "Do you believe there are WMD in Iraq that hasn't been found that would have justified the war had we discovered it?" he asked. Huckabee offered this response:

I think it's more likely that that weapons of mass destruction that we know that he at one time had, he used weapons against the Kurds, good chance they may have gone to Jordan. We don't know where they are.

Josh Marshall points out that, "if you keep up on right-wing moonbat orthodoxy," you'll know that it's Syria -- not Jordan -- where they allege the weapons were supposedly smuggled to.

The Bush-commissioned Iraq Survey Group, charged with determining the truth regarding Saddam's weapons programs, declared in its final assessment that "it was unlikely" that any such official transfer to Syria took place:

The investigation centered on the possibility that WMD materials were moved to Syria. ... ISG found no senior policy, program, or intelligence officials who admitted any direct knowledge of such movement of WMD. Indeed, they uniformly denied any knowledge of residual WMD that could have been secreted to Syria. [...]

Based on the evidence available at present, ISG judged that it was unlikely that an official transfer of WMD material from Iraq to Syria took place. However, ISG was unable to rule out unofficial movement of limited WMD-related materials.

The ISG concluded that "Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991."

Tagged as: jordan, wmd, iraq, huckabee

Faiz Shakir is the Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Editor of ThinkProgress.org and The Progress Report.