Only for Ryan_Liam, but that’s just due to pity and contempt - he’s only worth seventeen syllables. I can’t elaborate in GD, however.
Limericks are so gauche!
-Joe
Argument by attrition can take a while. I imagine that Scylla has a macro that generates variations on “Cite?”.
-Joe
I beg to differ. Admittedly, it’s been over a decade since I did any serious NBC training, but I can still rattle off half a dozen chemical agents that are way more dangerous. Blood agents and nerve agents are harder to detect, kill much faster and are lethal in doses orders of magnitude below those of mustard gas.
The state of the art has progressed - if that is indeed the word - since 1917.
I think bats are bugs.
Go ahead, prove they’re not.
G’wan.
“…the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
“Being an oily liquid” means that it is not a WMD? Not by anyone’s definition that I ever heard. The “degraded” form that various posters are frothing about can certainly still be deadly, as your cite shows.
It would be “trace amounts” of a WMD. If we had just found trace amounts of sarin and mustard gas in Iraq, then you are correct that it would nearly insignificant.
But hundreds of munitions? Not so much.
In case it wasn’t clear, I should restate my belief - ‘WMD’ refers to nuclear, chemical, or biological agents. There might be a critical mass of whatever you find before you can class it as dangerous - although Scylla’s point about lethal dose for sarin is interesting - but ISTM that 500 or so is enough to be dangerous, especially if distributed on the black market to terrorists, as was one of the stated reasons for the invasion.
Which is, as I stated in the OP, the major reason that this thread has persisted. Evidence has emerged supporting one of the stated reasons for the invasion. We can’t have that, now can we?
If Hitler were still in charge of Germany, would you support an invasion of that country?
Let’s see -
Slaughter of Jews = slaughter of Kurds
Invasion of Czechoslovakia = invasion of Kuwait
Mass graves = mass graves
Torture chambers = torture chambers
Etc.
Regards,
Shodan
Tear gas?
If you haven’t noticed, you’re disagreeing with yourself, unless trace amounts of a WMD constitute a WMD.
Ah, so these were the weapons that would enable Saddam to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world.
I think the phrase is, “not exactly.”
I call Godwin! 
Yes, let´s see:
Saddam didn´t have the capability for doing squat, he was already vanquished and contained. The Iraqi army was a shadow of it´s already over-rated past; the only way Hussein could have invaded or attacked a neighboring nation (let alone the USA) would be on a RISK game.
Oopsie! That cite is about the torture that is happening right now in Saddam-free Iraq.
We can’t have that, now, can we?
Not only has evidence not emerged supporting this stated reason for the invasion but in fact significant evidence has emerged supporting the idea that the invasion vastly increased the possibility that any real WMD that had existed would have ended up in the hands of terrorists. I.e, the evidence that has emerged supports the idea that our invasion actually made a problem we were claiming to try to deal with significantly worse…except for the fact that one of the premises underlying the existence of this problem (i.e., the existence of the WMD) turned out to be false.
I suppose if GW Bush’s plan to keep WMD out of the hands of terrorists consisted of invading Iraq, gift-wrapping any WMDs we found and mailing them to Osama bin Laden, then Shodan would still be defending it.
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes!
Bugs are insects. Bats are not insects. They are mammals. Bats are not bugs. QED.
Your turn.
“Bug” is a term of art.
I’m not going to go through that whole thing, if you don’t.
Yes. I have.
Ok. Let me try to be reasonable here. The summary of the report says the weapons are “degraded.” It also says that they would be sought by terrorists or insurgents. Clearly this means that they are not perceived to be useless.
This is where Santorum gets the word, and where everybody else gets the word. Saying the word “degraded” does not magically make all the bad stuff go away.
“Degraded” in the context it was used was as a general description of the set of 500 shells. You commit a fallacy if you apply that generalization specifically. In the report it does not say in what manner the shells are “degraded.” It’s nonspecific.
“Degraded” might mean they are completely inert. It might also mean that a couple of them simply need a shine to be made brand new again. It’s a nonspecific general descriptor.
Now. We know that the Sarin gas is probably severely degraded unless it is stored in binary shells, and we have reason to doubt there is much there. We can also guess that do to the age and condition of the shells there is probably a serious question as to whether they could safely be used as artillery or whether they would actually fire.
We do however know that Mustard gas is a very stable compound. We know that it retains it potency stored in shells that date back to WWI. We know it is potent in barrels and shells from WWII. We know that it is potent in our own stores dating back to 1968 or earlier. We know that exposed to seawater in an open environment it is still potent for five years.
Mysteriously though, you place a lot of faith in the single word “degraded” applied as a blanket generalization. You seem to think that someone saying the word in a generalized and nonspecific fashion has the magic power to make mustard gas inert.
Is this magic mustard gas that just deteriorates unlike any other mustard gas?
Why do you think that the generalized “degraded” applies specifically to the condition of the mustard gas and may not be simply describing the outside condition of the shell.
The evidence is pretty clear based on chemistry and observed instances of recovery in decade (or century) old mustard gas that it does not degrade.
Yet, you choose to combat historical evidence, chemistry, and experimental evidence with one generalized nonspecific word found in a summary of a report and repeated as if it were a magic totem.
It doesn’t work that way.
Scylla, you seem to have completely lost sight of the debate here, which is whether Hussein had an arsenal of weapons so dangerous it was absolutely necessary to invade his country to prevent them from using them. In fact, he didn’t, and nothing posted in the OP or any later post in this thread supports a contrary conclusion.
No. I have not. If you read my posts you’ll see that twice I have stated that these don’t prove anything in terms of the larger debate, and that they aren’t the WMDs being referred to to justify the war. Rather, they are leftover probably lost shells.
My whole interest here is to debunk the asinine notion that because a given shell is old it is inert, or much less dangerous than a new one. Mustard gas lasts a long time. Sarin in a binary form is dangerous still. In '04 insurgents detonated a binary shell of Sarin (they clearly didn’t know what it was) and because it didn’t mix it wasn’t a particularly big deal. Two soldiers were hospitalized temporarily.
The point is that if they did know what it was and they had the expertise to mix it, it could have been particularly devastating. Same goes for mustard gas. Degraded does not equal inert.
You ignored David Kay’s statement that the mustard agent was too degraded to do anything more than burn skin.
The argument that insurgents would like these shells means nothing. The insurgents would like anything at all that they could use to make IEDs. IED’s are not WMD. IED’s made of old mustard gas shells are not WMD. “Dangerous” =! WMD. These particular shells would probably be more dangerous to anyone who tried to detonate them than they would be to their targets.
The Duelfer report explicitly says that these munitions do not pose a significant military threat to US troops.
As to the word “degraded,” I’m pretty sure that it means the cannisters themselves are deterorated to such an extent that their chemical contents (the sulfur mustard) have not been preserved. All your cites about mustard agents state that it lasts a long time if properly stored. The Iraqis made cheap and shitty munitions. The Wiki cite upthread says that the sarin shells typically only lasted a few weeks, I doubt the mustard shells were built to last much longer.
I think your contention that Santorum’s use of the word “degraded” was meant to apply generically to all the shells is a bit of a reach, by the way. The first word he said after “degraded” was “mustard.” If any of those shells still had any WMD capability I think you would have heard about it by now.
I, Joe terrorist, want to get my filthy hands on some old style mustard gas so I can go around my dastardly business:
A) Pack my rucksack with food and water and start scouting the torrid Iraqi landscape with a metal detector in hopes of finding a left over shell that may or may not contain bad mojo that in all probability is well past its best-used-by date.
B) Ask my semi bright cousin Bob, who got a junior chemistry set on his 12th birthday to google the recipe for mustard gas and brew some in the backyard.
Chemical weapons are not rocket science, if you really want them there´s little to stop you from making themselves wherever you are, like Tokyo or something.
I´m still trying to understand the motive for such enthusiastic harping on these derelict shells.
I’m unfamiliar with this. Could you please provide a cite for my further edification?
That’s a good point. Mustard gas isn’t very difficult to manufacture. Most people have the ingredients under their sink to make a low grade chlorine gas. I’m sure some motivated fanatics could probably slap something together that would work better than what’s in those shells.