The military has been over there almost four weeks now. Where the hell are the WMDs? What the heck have they been doing all this time? How hard can it be?
All you have to do is search every square foot of Iraq. The place is not infinitely large, after all. It’s only 171,599 square miles, so it’s a matter of simple division to determine how many people you’ll need to stand shoulder to shoulder and finish the job in, say, a day or two. Just give each person a shovel and let them dig, oh, a few hundred feet. The only other thing you have to do is make sure every person is honest and no one is moving vials and canisters around secretly.
Lib, the US and UK governments started a war on the basis that there were WMDs in Iraq. The burden is on them to prove it, and that burden is not mitigated by the difficulty they might have in doing so.
Lib, maybe you can help me out in understanding this.
If there are, or were, WOMD, why were they not used. I mean, if you’re not going to use them against an invading army, why have them at all? And the alleged scientist who worked in the WOMD program (I’m not saying he’s lying, I just don’t know yet), he says they destroyed them days before the war. Then buried the materials.
Destroyed them days before the war? Why? I mean, why then. when you need them most. And why bury the materials? Did they think they’d be able to go back and retrieve them? Did they not think we were going to round them all up?
Again, maybe I’m just thinking like a westerner. But if someone was invading us, we’d throw put-near everything we had at them.
My theory is that at the beginning of the war, the WOMD were all hastily gathered up and stashed in a warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of Industrial Baghdad, and that they’ll turn up in about six months, when things are back to normal and people have time to spare from the problem of “survival with no water or electricty” and turn their attention to their warehouses.
And of course there will be no paper trail to show who put the WOMD there, but by then nobody will care. Six months is such a long time in the American public’s attention span.
The question being, if we could track Iraq’s bio/chem weapons that well without even being in Iraq, isn’t the US government running out of excuses for why it can’t find them on the ground, when it could spy them well enough from the air?
Maybe, just maybe people were right when they said the only use for such weapons was offensive. If they had been used, say, on the outskirts of Baghdad, it’s just as likely the winds would have blown them back into the city. Actually, such “weapons” as chemical & biological agents are really not much good for either offensive or defensive purposes for that very reason. What they are good for is terrorism.
Seriously, I’m glad to see that someone else also says it’s worth following as opposed to discounting it immediately or pouncing on it as proof positive.
The NYT is usually fairly liberal politically and is also fairly conservative when it comes to reporting rumors and unsubstantiated guesses; it would be uncharacteristic for them to be either going out of their way to support the current administration or basing a front-page article on poorly-supported evidence. But it is still not confirmed officially, and Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division is quoted as saying
There are a lot of “ifs” remaining and it would not be the first time a lead did not pan out.
This argument confuses me. We have pictures of trucks on the sites loading up the gear * in order to hide them *. In other words – we knew where they were and the Iraqis had plenty of warning that inspections were coming and moved the stuff. So why is it surprising that we are having trouble finding where they hid it?
I think that people employing the argument that “we have satellites so we must know where they put the stuff” are greatly overestimating what one can learn by satellite survelliance – especially when satellite coverage is a) intermittent, b) obscured by weather and darkness, c) can’t easily track moving objects (field of view is sharply limited) and d) time of passage of satellites is often known to the people on the ground who can time their movements to avoid them.
Yes-- aerial surveillance can spot people loading up trucks and getting out of Dodge the day before inspections are scheduled. If this happens often enough, it presents a reasonable supposition that the people being observed have something to hide. But laws of physics and optics prevent us from actually following those trucks and figuring out where they are being taken, nor can we examine the contents of these trucks in any detail.
Consider (among other things) that the greater the magnification of a scene, the smaller the field of view. So it’s possible to get high resolution pictures of a small area – maybe even good enough to identify individual vehicles. But to get this resolution, you have to focus in on a very small area. Now think how big Iraq is. You can’t take high resolution pictures of the entire country every single minute of every day, hoping to catch something interesting. I imagine that you have to have other intelligence assets telling you where to direct the cameras for maximum benefit.
I follow your argument to some extent, Finagle. But it seems to me that if we could find thirty-some bio/chem weapons sites last fall and winter, then we ought to be able to find one now, by one means or another. Our intelligence sources that told our cameras where to look can’t have all gotten killed in the war, and those that survived would certainly have an easier time of updating us on where the yucky stuff is. Not to mention, they’ve had a month with other priorities besides hiding such weapons, like trying to repel an invasion.
