A lot of people are saying that the chemical warheads found by the inspectors are an Iraqi violation, but not a “smoking gun.” Even Ari Fleisher, speaking for Bush, was unwilling to say that they were a smoking gun. Well, I think they are.
From a POV of international law, Iraq is supposed to voluntarily disarm all their WMDs and prove to the UN that they have done so. They were supposed to report to the UN all prohibited weapons. These warheads are included in the class of prohibited WMDs. They were not on Iraq’s report to the UN. Q.E.D.
From a practical POV, there was never a hope that the inspectors could find all prohibited weapons. Frankly, I never expected them find any of them. Finding some of them is definte evidence that Iraq has not complied. That’s the best we ever could have hoped for. The fact that the inspectors found one set of prhibited weapons is strong evidence that many others also exist.
BTW, I would ask those who disagree to explain what they think a “smoking gun” would be, since this term was not used in any Security Council resolution.
If the Bushistas thought they had a chance in hell of selling this as proof positive, they would be all over this, and toot damn sweet, too. The very fact of backing away from that posture tells you just about everything you need to know.
Potentially, Nasty Stuff could go into those shells, but it is the Nasty Stuff that is prohibited, not these shells. Since we are given to understand that these shells were purchased in 1988, it may be taken to indicate that since 1988 Saddam bin Laden either (a) had Nasty Stuff or (b) was contemplating obtaining some Nasty Stuff.
Umm… no. Those shells are, in fact prohibited. They are shells specifically designed to carry chemical weapons. If I’m a convicted felon and barred from owning a gun, and the police find a 9mm stashed in my house, can I use that excuse? “Well, the gun by itself is meaningless. I have no bullets, and it’s the bullets that are really forbidden, right?”
A.) Iraq is not supposed to have WMDs, or programs designed to make WMDs.
B.) Iraq was found to possess warheads designed for use with chemical weapons, and said warheads were found to be in quite good repair.
I’m not sure I agree with ElJeffe on the point that Iraq isn’t allowed to have these shells at all. Not without a more specific citation, anyhow. Does anyone know if these shells can be used as dual-purpose warheads?
This type of shell may well be specifically prohibited in the post-Gulf War agreements, but if they are not there is a compelling historical example which demonstrates how a chemical weapon can be used conventionally. Witness the U.S. Army’s Chemical Mortar Battallions. Those units put in years of good, hard fighting without ever, as far as I know, firing a single chemical warhead in combat. The rounds used by their oversized mortars were converted from gas to high explosive, and they proved their worth throughout WWII and Korea.
I think it’a partly a question of whether you belive the Iraqi government is trying to cooperate or not.
I heard this morning that they have thousands of missiles like this listed in their report; they claim they just forgot about these 12.
That sounds plausible to me, since they don’t seen to have any Nasty Stuff in them.
For elucidator:
I doubt the Bush (ahem) administration needs a smoking gun. If they don’t find one, they claim a lack of cooperation, which is a violation. This would be based on “Secret Evidence” i.e. unchallangeable assertions of the most trustworthy government in the world.
Actually, I don’t think they even want a smoking gun… if it turns out to be a pea-shooter then everyone says, ‘what’s the big deal? I wonder if this really is a smokescreen for a failure to revive the economy and big tax cuts for the GOP and their fat cat masters?’
I am currently working in a defense contracing firm and I just asked our Aerospace VP and he said that it depends on what you are firing. A typical warhead could be modified fairly easily (for weapons scientists, not for me) to convert it to do whatever they wanted - conventional explosives, biological, etc. Converting from a chemical weapons warheads to a conventional warhead would be really easy. Conventional to biological is harder, depending on the dispersement method.
But in general, he said, there’s not much point in developing a chemical weapon warhead if you’re going to use it for another purpose. As for the specific Iraqi situation with these things, if they were going to just use them for normal munitions with no intention of chemical weapons, they probably would have converted them to conventional warheads by them and stuck them on a rocket and not buried them in the sand. The fact that they did so makes him think that they were planning on using them for chemical weapons deliveries in the future.
This is all with his caveat that he doesn’t have all the information and he’s assuming that when they say chemical warhead they mean one that is outfitted at this time for chemical weapons, and not conventional. And of course, he is just basing his analysis of the event on his own thought processes, which may not reflect accurately on what the Iraqis were planning.
I’m curious why ElJeffe would use a metaphor that is so spot on yet still mangle it.
*If I’m a convicted felon and barred from owning a gun, and the police find a 9mm stashed in my house, can I use that excuse? “Well, the gun by itself is meaningless. I have no bullets, and it’s the bullets that are really forbidden, right?” *
Wouldn’t it be more like if they found empty shell casings in house. Iraq is not banned from having any weapons, merely ones of certain range and type.
Regardless a metaphor is completely unneccessary as ElJeffe himself noted that the shells themselves are prohibited. So it is more like a guy prohibitted from having bullets in his house turns out to have some in an old drawer he (supposedly)forgot about.
To expand upon my earlier comment that this changes nothing:
There are basically three schools of thought here. The first school claims that Saddam was in material breach of the the UNSC as soon as he gave us 12,000 pages of demonstrably incomplete garbage. Any further breaches are irrelevant, in the same way that once someone commits a crime, it doesn’t matter if he commits any more or not, because he’s still going to jail. The second school holds that unless Saddam is found personally holding a bucket of plutonium and a warhead, Iraq will not be in material breach. This seems to be the Hans Blix school.
And the third school, of course, holds that even in that case, Iraq should not be declared in material breach, because The Best Way To Solve Problems Is To Not Have Any Enemies, as explained so eloquently by the ever insightful Ms. Crow.
Jeff
That evidence is still top secret. Its probably the same evidence they had when this whole thing started. Only the US and England has this evidence and they havent devulged it as of yet. From the way Bush and Blair are talking, they seem to think that its enuf to justify going to war with Iraq on their own. It had better be a doozy.
Well, elucidator, they tried, but the lines were busy, and then the cell couldn’t get any reception. And didn’t you hear from my secretary? She swears she talked with somebody about the whole affair. We’ll get it resolved right away.
I don’t see how a warhead with nothing in it can be a “chemical warhead.” They could always put TNT or nukes in it, or use it to make a “dirty” radiation bomb. If it’s empty, I fail to see why it’s a “chemical warhead.”
Not being an expert in chemical weapons, this is just a guess, but I would speculate that chemical and biological warheads would include some sort of dispersion mechanism. Also, perhaps separate sections to hold the explosive and the actual chemical component. At any rate, I find not in the least surprising that a chemical warhead differs from a bio warhead differs from a regular warhead.
I think it’s obvious that the Iraqi’s forgot about these empty casings one way or the other. If they’d had serious plans for them they wouldn’t have left someplace obvious, like say, an ammunition storage area.
I have to quibble with them being called warheads, since the standard definition of one includes the ammunition inside of a warhead. It’s kind of like calling a car body with no engine or drivetrain and automobile. I can be somewhat forgiving of a news outlet using the term since saying “chemical warhead casings” isn’t as catchy, but I think we can be more accurate here.
BTW the White House’s assertion that they weren’t in the declaration, still hasn’t been verified by a third party. The UN is currently investigating.
Tests are being undertaken right now to determine how recently they might have been loaded. This, to me, will determine whether or not it was loaded recently. If it was loaded recently, then I would consider it an undeniable material breach, and hence from the inspector’s perspective, a smoking gun.
In a slightly OT note, I will say that Iraq’s possession of chemical weapons still isn’t enough for me to endorse a war.
Chemical warheads differ in design from your basic HE/frag warhead: Where the traditional HE warhead is relatively thick-shelled (to send more fragments whizzing through the air on exploding), a chemical warhead would be thin-skinned, saving weight to deliver more chemical agent. It would be designed for a small explosive charge - just enough to disperse the agent - where the HE warhead will have a much more substantial charge.
Any Army Field Manual in the world lists shells with low-grade explosions as an indication of chemical attack.
(FTR, putting a nuke in a 122 mm artillery rocket would call for a very, very advanced design.)
These aren’t Scud warheads, btw - the 122 mm free-flight missile is a battlefield weapon with a maximum range of 20 km. They’re launched from a multi-barrel launcher and while they’re pretty imprecise, they can deliver a lot of ordnance on the target area in a very short time.
To keep in line with the metaphoric tendencies in this thread (and since ‘smoking gun’ is also a metaphor) I would tend to characterize this find as more of an “unloaded, never yet used shell of a bullet from a gun which has probably not been fired very recently”…but then I am not a gifted metaphorist. Seriously though, IMHO I think the Bush oil and energy regime is waiting for public/international opinion to sway a little more. As they have stated, they feel they need no smoking gun to invade iraq. The real battle is being fought in international opinion polls and at places like the UN and NATO. I personally hope the Saudi coup attempt that I have read about is successful.
Actually, these empty warheads are proof that Iraq is not in material breach. We keep demanding that they prove that they’ve gotten rid of their WOMDs; now, they can point to those empty shells and say, “Yes, these used to contain nasty stuff, but now they’re empty. We destroyed the contents, just like you told us to.” Spin works both ways, don’t it?
