1 shell?
Geez, don’t the Deminuers working in Verdun pull at least that many mustard gas shells out of the ground every single day?
…not that it won’t stop the usual conservative Bush apologists from milking it for all it’s worth. I’m sure Rush Limbaugh is already telling his audience how one ten-year-old shell is equivalent to 500,000 tons of vX, and is capable of killing every man, woman, and child in New York City if the detonation had occurred in midtown Manhattan. :rolleyes:
Have we even established if the sarin was from Iraq to begin with? Maybe one of those imported terrorists smuggled it into the country…
Yes, 1 shell.
Wasn’t this the same mistake Japan made?
This is the first shell they’ve used. If you were a resistance fighter or Al Qaeda, and you only had one shell, what would you do with it? Does this seem like the type of attack that warrents your one and only shell.
OR is this a test case? I consider a more reasonable explanation to be that this one shell came from a large batch of shells and who ever set this off was curious if it would work.
Fortunately it seems they didn’t quite get it right.
I imagine there’s a little team of white-coated Al Qaeda operatives very busy right now evaluating the video footage and trying to figure out what went wrong.
Sure its a 10 year old shell, but that means someone has been sitting on it for a loooong time. Again, if you had one shell, sitting in your garage, why use it now, on one truck, a year after the invasion? How do you imagine the scenario went? Ahmed Jr and his buddies are digging through his dad’s closet looking for Playboys. Little Ahmed Jr finds a big hunk of metal with a biohazard symbol on it and decides it might be fun to strap it to a bottle-rocket?
Perhaps to prevent future confusion, could some one provide a minimum number of sarin filled shells required to be considered a “smoking gun?” And while you’re at it, what else do we have to find “more than one” of? Is it wrong if they find just “one” mobile sarin gas lab? Just one underground anthrax lab? Just one nuke?
I’ll go back now to dealing with my cardial condition…
Hey, neither can I!
The thing is, it doesn’t help Bush to be right about the WMDs, if he had a war plan that didn’t guard against the possibility that he was right about the WMDs. And that’s the sort of war plan Rummy cooked up for him: cut troops, cut troops, and cut the troop levels some more, because we can get to Baghdad with half the troops the generals think we need.
But then - oops! - we don’t have enough troops to guard the prospective WMD sites that fall into our control as we advance. By the time our WMD units inspect the sites, they’ve been looted to the ground. (Washington Post, May 11, 2003. Been pointing out this fact since this thread a day or so later.)
So if there were WMDs, Bush and Rumsfeld failed to act on that knowledge in developing the war plan. What it means is that, due to their failure to have these sites guarded, Saddam’s WMDs fell into the hands of looters, and may still be used against us.
That’s nothing to boast about. We didn’t go to war to settle an academic question of whether or not Saddam had WMDs; we supposedly went to war to ensure that they wouldn’t be used against us by terrorists. The war plan didn’t make provision for securing WMDs, even though that was Bush’s supposed justification. So we’re much more at risk if it turns out there were WMDs than if there weren’t.
Does it really matter?
I guess for the purposes of THIS debate it would be nice to know if both the shell and the gas came from Iraq as part of Saddam’s program.
But seriously, someone had a shell with at least some Sarin gas in it, why am I the only one bothered by this?
If the shell came from Syria does the situation some how improve?
Show of hands, how many people think Rumsfeld took this over with him last weekend while he visited the troops? Sure is a big coincidence…
You said it right: “some” sarin.
Didn’t you read that the amount of one pinhead is enough to kill?
Did you hear reports of people that got killed?
(Did you read my posts?)
Salaam. A
No, for the purpose of this debate, it would be nice to know WHEN the agent was created.
In many cases, there couldn’t have been much in the way of satisfying proof to offer. Saddam’s regime didn’t have an extensive documentation system, and much of what it had was grossly inaccurate do to Soviet style “if you fail, report success!” production process whereby apparently there are records of stuff that never actually got made in the first place. Plus, we bombed the shit out of most of the buildings that would hold any relevant documents. And we bombed the shit out of many of the places where we thought the stockpiles were, which doesn’t exactly provide anyone with a means to document the destruction of something they didn’t destroy themselves.
Given that whomever had this shell didn’t even seem to know what it was, I’d say that there is a high chance it’s just some random leftover that some guy had sitting on his mantlepiece and decided to hand over to help fight the Americans. If it even contained any gas at all. For the meager amount of damage it did and the unconcerned attitude the military has about people going near the danger area, it could have had the sarin components drained out long ago with just some residue left in the shell housing.
Confirmatory tests are ongoing.
Hmmm. A single 155 mm artillery shell (range about twelve miles) containing a binary agent dose of sarin (that only works effectively if actually fired from a gun) is actually
NOT A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION.
The only effective way to use such a weapon is to fire it from a gun, causing the binary agents to mix and react and then have the combined agents distributed by the explosives also contained in the shell when it reaches its target.* This means for it to be a weapon of mass destruction, Hussein would have had to line up dozens of these weapons within twelve miles of a target and fire them in barrage (given that gas is an extremely poor choice of offensive weapons–which is the real reason that major powers don’t bother to use them any more).
A very intense barrage against a village where the people and the gasses are both trapped in the same valley and the people do not have the wherewithal to flee makes gas an effective localized terror weapon. Similarly, covering a swamp over which an attacking army must cross (especially when the “army” consists of untrained women and children drafted by some ayatolleh to act as “minesweepers” for the actual army behind them) makes gas a decent (but not really good) defensive weapon.
Gas remains a really poor excuse for an offensive weapon–and as a “terror” weapon, a 155 mm binary agent shell sucks eggs.
*This, by the way, is the reason it was relatively ineffective, today. Exploding such a shell without the initial firing from the gun that causes the agents to mix means that the very explosion of the device dissipates its potential toxins.
The reports I’m reading say preliminary tests show positive results for sarin. We’ve seen the preliminary tests give plenty of false positives so far, so I would question their evidenciary value. And as people have mentioned, it seems rather obtuse that terrorists would have a single shell they dug up from the Iran-Iraq war, know it was sarin, then blow it up as part of a roadside bomb in such a way that it eliminates the chemical effect. Even if it had gone off effectively, we’re talking about what, a dozen dead?
You know the saddest truth of this whole deal?
For the next god knows how many months, we get to hear morons arguing that we found WMDs and thus everything is justified.
Boy, it never occured to me before that Hussein was a bad man. Thanks Millie ol buddy. Hey is water wet?
As far as I’ve seen, there’s no indication that this didn’t come from Saddam’s warehouses. So perhaps those “morons” will be correct about us finding WMD. And maybe they’ll just be responding to those geniuses that have been repeating the mantra that “Bush lied” about WMD.
tomndebb, I’m confused why a single shell containing a chemical agent is not a weapon of mass destruction. I understand that it can be more deadly (effective?) if it’s used in a different method, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a WMD just because it wasn’t used in the most effective manner.
Or are you arguing that it’s harmless if used in the current manner? I’d be very interested to know if that’s true or if you can point me to a cite where I can learn more about it.
laigle raises a good point, though. We’ve only got preliminary tests, and those have given false positives before. Plus, as has been pointed out a number of times, there’s no indication that this shell was from Hussein’s stockpiles. Anyway, I think we may all be jumping the gun.
By the way, where are people getting the idea that the shell was 10 years old? Is that somewhere in an article that I missed?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3722255.stm
*"However, a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity.
He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.*
By my math, that puts it in the neighborhood of 20-odd years old.
Yea, finding one 15 year old shell is exactly the same as claiming there are dozens of active facotries mass producing weapons to attack America
Man, you are working that strawman so hard there is smoke coming off it.
Nobody here has said anything about “dozens of active factories mass producing weapons to attack America.” And we certainly haven’t equated this one shell with such things.
Even so, the facts aren’t in yet. Maybe you should take a deep breath. As it is, the only thing this one shell has demonstrated is that you’re totally unwilling to look at the facts in a detached, rational manner.
Thanks for the cite, Jophiel.
Well, it depends on your definition. I note that you linked to a pge that highlights the semantic difficulties of the phrase
The USG has this codified def:
FY97 National Defense Authorization Act
Public Law 104-201
September 23, 1996
TITLE XIV–DEFENSE AGAINST WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
SEC. 1403. DEFINITIONS. In this title:
(1) The term “weapon of mass destruction” means any weapon or device that is intended, or has the capability, to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of people through the release, dissemination, or impact of–
(A) toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors;
(B) a disease organism; or
© radiation or radioactivity.
Is there any reason whatsoever to think that the find of this shell is relevant
I’m not the one who went in front of the UN with a PowerPoint presentation on the subject.
“Should we now all agree that Saddam was a bad boy bent on evil, or shall we continue our silly rationalizations which posit that Uncle Saddam didn’t have any mean illegal weapons?”
It was even in bold.
Oh, I’m more than willing, once anything is found. Keep in mind, I’m not the one going around making desperate posts on the subject.
Wait, wait, stop arguing aginst the WMD definition.
It is a weapon of mass distruction.
WE FOUND IT!
Now we can go home, right?
Hot damn, war’s over, we won, see ya!
Tris