A quick check of GD and the Pit didn’t reveal any thread from the past 24 hours on the IAEA’s report, so scuse any duplicate threads.
Anyway, I’m generally the sort who prefers partisan bloodletting to reasoned debate, but this is the first story on Iraq that I’ve actually found truly disturbing, on a personal level, since the invasion.
I don’t know what to make of the story. Part of me feels a kind of sick glee at the prospect of the Administration dropping the ball so badly; I mean, this kinda blows the whole allowing looters to run off with priceless relics thing completely outta the water.
On the other hand, Jesus… what the hell are they doing over there, if they can’t take the most basic precautions to ensure that whatever phony premise they had for starting the damn war in the first place doesn’t become reality?
Dunno what I’m looking for here. Sorry if this is better suited for the Pit.
First the Administration was wrong when they claimed that Iraq had yellowcake.
But now, according to your link, the Administration is at fault for letting Iraq’s yellowcake get out of the country.
Somethin’ ain’t makin’ any sense here.
Which is a little bit different from “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Why no thread? Because we can’t keep up. Usually, bad news of administration fuck-up at least have the silver lining, that people become more aware. Like most humans, I am an odd admixture of the tender and the callous, I sneer with partisan pleasure when mine political enemy is shown to be chucklewitted, and recoil in horror from the certainty that this is going to cost, this is going to hurt. When Bozo slips on the banana peel, its funny. When GeeDubya fucks up, people die.
My partisan pleasure is over-stuffed, sated to nausea, like six gross ice cream sundaes in a row. No, no, give me time, let me have a few days to recover my composure, a little time to get my shields back up.
So I fall back to this: it can’t be true, it’s simply not possible for anyone…anyone…to be so grossly incompetent as to not keep such materials under guard. Serious guard. Hard-eyed, hard trained Marines who snack on thumb tacks and ball bearings, not some loading dock supervisor in the Reserves.
So lets just hope it’s bullshit, total partisan bullshit made up to embarass The Leader. Let the Tighty Righties crow in righteous gloatany, I’ll read every post, I swear. We’ve got plenty of real ammo anyway, we can easily afford it.
It ain’t true because it just can’t be true. Nobody is that stupid. Nobody. And the shade of Barbara Tuchman glides into the room, and the air chills, and her ethereal voice queries “You read my books? How many times? And you still don’t get it? Putz.”
Gee, I thought yellowcake was yellowcake. The origin of the yellowcake that Saddam conveniently did/didn’t have (insert desired situation as needed) makes a difference?
Aw, c’mon, John. We already knew Saddam had “yellowcake” because we knew he had uranium mines. We knew how much he had, we knew where it was because the IAEA inspectors told us. We also knew he didn’t have enough yellowcake, which is why the bullshit about buying more had some significance. It takes a hell of a lot of raw uranium to make weapons grade shit. And the process is a huge undertaking (see Oak Ridge, Tennessee) about as easy to hide as a project to make the Euphrates run east-west rather than north-south.
But at the very, very least Iraq would have required tons of uranium to even begin such a project. Tons of uranium they wouldn’t have to account for.
Now, there is some comfort in that. If its just plain old yellowcake, its nasty shit, but not really nasty shit. Wouldn’t be worth the trouble, probably, with our loyal Pakistani allies conducting nuclear Amway parties. For sure, its some serious stuff, and shouldn’t be left lying around without some guys with guns scattered around the perimeter. I don’t have the facts/figures on this, but I’d make a rough guess that a pound of ground-zero Chernobyl dirt is more dangerous than a pound of plain yellowcake.
Number 10 thought there was a difference. The September dossier distinguished between the uranium that Iraq admitted to and the notorious African stuff. From Chaper 3, section 20:
In the 70s, Iraq built a light water reactor ostensibly for power generation at Tuwaitha. Neighbours feared that it was really for weapons development. At the start of the Iraq-Iran war in, Iran bombed the place (September 20, 1980), but didn’t destroy it. Israel finished the job on June 7, 1981.
The facilities at Tuwaitha were sealed and were under a regular inspection regime since Gulf War I.
US WMD search teams found the place, smashed into it and for a very short time it was talked about as proof of Saddam’s nuclear ambitions. The IAEA pointed out that the facility was not actually secret, and that they would like to survey the damage to the place. Bush of course refused, but then later changed his mind. Meanwhile, the US had walked away, leaving it unprotected. When the IAEA got there, they found that the locals had looted the place, had dumped the yellowcake out of the barrels it was stored in, and were using the barrels for water storage.
No one really knows where all of the yellowcake went.