kylen, I heard a report on either CNN or MSNBC today that said that Iraqi troops have been found with issued gas masks. The reasoning goes that since they would know that the US wouldn’t use CW/BW, then this must mean that Saddam may.
If you’ve been reading this forum much, you will already know that I am quite skeptical of all such early reports. But I thought I’d share anyway.
I think Iraq is accused of manufacturing some of its weapons. And I do understand that much of Iraq’s conventional and some if its alleged non-conventional weapons were provided by the US, Britain, France, Russia and others. And this makes the potential for “planting” WMD all the easier.
The fact that reporters do not question what they are presenting in their articles (and again, I appolgise for not providing a more specific link to my example) is not isolated to this conflict. But it sure makes it a lot easier to use the reporters to spread the word of WMD or whatever you want. I don’t know that your average war-correspondant would recognize a chemical survival suit from a nuclear survival suit from one of those hospitals gowns that do up in the back. And I don’t know that a lot of journalists or even trained soldiers would recognize a storehouse of VX or sarin. But I do know that a comment by a General and a few paragraphs in the mainstream media can color the opinions of many people.
The issue of the Iraqi soldiers using the cover of a hospital wasn’t addressed in my post, but again, it is reported as such so we believe it to be such. It’s really that simple. I am not a conspiracy theorist saying that everything coming out of the war is wrong or misleading or outright lies. But if all we have to hear is one report on water to Basra being cut off and it dominates Ari Fleischer’s press conference, then the potential exists for we, the poeple, to be mislead. Or if the military informs the media that a hospital being used as a cover for Iraqi soldiers, and it permeates these boards, we can be mislead. Yesterday the army captured a chemical weapons factory. Or did it? The hodge-podge of forces in some of the major Iraqi cities laid down their arms, and weren’t going to put up a fight. And then they did. A “terror-attack” perpetrated on a US military base by unknown Iraqi “terrorists” was actually, it turns out, carried out by an american. In this day and age of maximum information availablitly to the west, these stories take on a life of their own with very little effort.
So yes, I think it would be easy to “plant” WMD, especially if you don’t even have to actually have them to do so.
To respond to the second part of the OP, I would say that in the international community a great deal of proof would be required to confirm that the WMD are, in fact, of Iraqi origin. Unfortunately, this campaign is not being conducted with the sanctioning of the UN or the international community proper.
The current coallition of countries (The US and Britain specifically) have shown little regard to the desires of the UN while using its auspices to wage this war. I very much believe that if WMD are discovered (and I do think it is possible, though to what extent I don’t know) I could see the US and Britain simply acknowledging their discovery, destroying them ASAP to “prevent their use” (or some military double-speak amounting to the same) and then saying “see!!!, see!!!”
This war was not started under UN law, so there is little reason for it to end under UN law.