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May 17, 2004
It looks like we may
It looks like we may have finally found some chemical weapons in Iraq. Specifically,two artillery shells; one a 155mm artillery shell filled with sarin nerve agent, and a second with mustard gas. The latter had been rigged as an IED(improvised explosive device, military-speak for booby trap).
There have been false alarms before, and laboratory analysis is needed as field tests can yield false positives.
The shells are old, pre-1991, and only two have been found so far. Therefore the left will keep up their "Bush Lied" mantra. But it needs to be remembered that .... the 1991 agreement ... Iraq was to give up ALL of their old WMD. They were to first, declare it all and two, destroy it in a verifyable manner. By the latter it was meant that they would either destroy it in the presence of UN inspectors, or, in their absense, provide proof that they had destroyed it. It was this "gap" between what they admitted to having at the end of the Gulf War and what they could prove that they destroyed that was the basis for the invasion last year.
Saddam could plausibly claim that these weapons were simply overlooked. And, after all, between mid 1980's and 1991 they did produce a prodigious quantity of the stuff. And, with a carelessness typical of totalitarian regimes, they did not distinguish between chemical munitions and conventional munitions in their storage depots. That is to say, chemical shells were intersperced with conventional high-explosive shells in storage bunkers.
Either way, look for the left to quickly dismiss this important new find.
Lt Smash has some good analaysis:
Any chemical attack via artillery would have to use several shells over a wide area to be effective. Thus, we can conclude that whoever planted this explosive:
# Didn't know that it was a chemical weapon, or
# Doesn't know how to properly employ such a chemical weapon, or
# Intended to terrorize the Coalition, rather than cause significant damage.
Given that the proven existence of chemical weapons in Saddam's arsenal represents a major propaganda victory for the Coalition, I find the third possibility to be highly unlikely. Of the remaining two possibilities, I'm more inclined to believe that the bombers weren't familiar with the difference between chemical and conventional artillery shells, and assumed they had the latter.
Posted by Tom at May 17, 2004 5:20 PM
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