By Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times

If Syria’s regime falls, the U.S. will be in a better position to answer one of the lingering questions from the long Iraq War: Did Baghdad ship weapons of mass destruction components to Syria before the 2003 American-led invasion?

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An opposition leader tells The Washington Times that a new, secular democracy in Syria would allow outside inspectors to survey and ensure destruction of what is believed to be one of the largest stockpiles of chemical weapons in the Middle East.

Western and Israeli intelligence suspect that Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria also owns weaponized nerve agents.

Spy satellites tracked a large number of truck convoys moving from Iraq to Syria in the weeks before the 2003 invasion, raising suspicions that some carried weapons of mass destruction.

The invading Americans never found stocks of such weapons in Iraq, despite two years of searching by the Iraq Survey Group.

The result spurred the political left to attack President Bush with slogans such as “Bush lied, troops died,” but nonpartisan national security figures said there was evidence that material may have been moved to Syria. There was just no way to get inside the Iranian-supported dictatorship to take a look.

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