No he didn’t. He never said the munitions weren’t degraded and he never said they still had any WMD capability.
Both are true.
Mustard gas lasts if properly stored. This stuff was not.
The David Kay quote IS a cite. Kay was the head WMD hunter in Iraq. Santorum is a cite. Every major news outlet reported that the shells were degraded. That statement has not been contradicted by anyone in the White House
The ones in France do not have WMD capability either.
What makes you think these aren’t breached. The shit is degraded (that’s not in dispute) and that would ne a good explanation as to why.
These shells ARE deteriorated.
Because it’s too degraded. It will blister skin. It cannot be aerosolized as a lethal gas. Mustard gas isn’t very lethal anyway, even at full strength.
Looks like my optimism was completely unfounded. We will have to define “mobile”.
Magiver, in your opinion, is any installation that can be dismantled and moved by heavy trucks “mobile” ? These days, my colleagues and I are designing a server farm - CRAC units, racks, switches, PDUs, server enclosures, routers, cooling towers, all that jazz. We’re not planning to move it, ever, but with the help of cranes and 60-ton tank carriers, we sure could. Turn everything of, load on flatbeds, move the hardware somewhere else, turn back on. Are we designing a mobile serverfarm ? Because that would be news to us…
And yoy didn’t answer my question - were you in fact referring to the June 1991 incident ? Do you have any evidence of a calutron farm running in Iraq after, say, the mid-nineties ?
First of all, during the run-up to war, I openly disagreed with the characterization of bio and chem weapons as WMDs, because of the extreme difficulty of using them to cause mass deaths. My understanding of the term “weapons of mass destruction” wasn’t any term-of-art understanding, but exactly how you’d parse it out. I don’t feel the Administration’s characterization was at all inconsistent with that, unless maybe you knew enough to understand some of the less obvious inconsistencies.
How I would have understood Bush’s claims at the time was not that he was saying Saddam had sarin and mustard gas, and these were WMDs, but that he had those things, and they could be used to make WMDs. Chances are Bush didn’t say it one way or the other, because of his speechwriters’ tendencies to paint a picture via juxtaposition, rather than make a case through well-defined argument. (E.g. talking about Saddam and 9/11 almost in the same breath, without actually asserting a connection.)
So I don’t see where I’ve changed. And I still think the “previously generally accepted standards” were those of the garden-variety meaning of “weapons of mass destruction” - something that can kill a lot of people at once, something that can kill more people than conventional weapons usually can.
I think if you’d asked 100 people at random in February 2003 whether weapons of mass destruction could kill more people than conventional weapons, you’d get 65 people saying ‘duh’, and the other 35 looking at you like you were an idiot for asking the question. We were sold on the idea not just that WMDs were merely different from conventional weapons, but that they were more deadly because of those differences.
Well, in post #312, you say these are WMDs, just not the right ones. Now you say they aren’t WMD at all.
Or are you saying that 500 or so chemical munitions shells can’t be used as WMD?
It does seem to me that the definition is going to be set up so as to exclude whatever is found in Iraq, even though the standard, most commonly accepted, general definition of WMDs is “nuclear, biological, and chemical agents”.
:shrugs: Can’t say I am surprised.
It was mentioned earlier that sarin does not degrade in its binary form. There seems to be evidence that at least some of Saddam’s sarin arsenal was in this form, and still therefore usable, since the sarin IED that was set off some months ago was in that form. Cite.
As far as the contention that “these aren’t the [del]droids you want[/del] WMDs we went to war over”, that is not as clear as is being asserted.
Most commonly accepted by whom, precisely? Apparently the word “mass” no longer has any meaning. You would like us to consider only the character of the weapon, and ignore the scale. Alternatively, you would like us to conflate numbers with scale. 500 degraded shells scattered round a country only constitute “weapons of mass destruction” if thousands of small-arms bullets also count. Do they? Does your average high street gun shop constitute a weapon of mass destruction? Would it still do so if its contents were scattered over an area the size of California?
Whether these findings qualify as WMD is an exercize in symantics. Would we have gone to war over these degraded canisters of questionable use. No mushroom cloud in those containers. Were we affraid of these. Hell no. This does not qualify as a reason for war .
Could you picture Rice saying we found a bunch of rusty beat up cannisters of degraded mustard gas and should attack immediately.
Only in the Shodan version of this thread, since I was discussing exactly that point, and you ran off and hid for awhile rather than debate me on that point. Excuse me, but you lost by default. WMDs are weapons of mass destruction, in the vernacular definition. They are weapons that can kill a lot of people or blow up a lot of shit at once, more so than most conventional weapons can.
Thank you for proving my point. Your cite, from May 2004, notes the discovery of one mustard-gas shell, and the explosion of one shell with a gallon of sarin. The two soldiers in the vicinity when it was exploded experienced only minor reactions.
And nobody quoted in the article, including Rumsfeld, called these WMDs.
This was on the Fox News site at the time. Anyone remember them going, “We’ve found WMDs in Iraq”? Me either. Maybe they’re in on the conspiracy to deny the WMDs, along with Bush and Rummy.
Then when the Iraq Survey Group finished up its work - surely aware of these discoveries - they concluded, guess what, no WMDs in Iraq.
So now we’re finding more of the same stuff. Has it been transmuted into WMDs between May 2004 and now? Maybe, along with ‘Intelligent’ Design and Right-Wing Climate Science, Alchemy is the latest pseudoscientific fad on the right. Wonder if Regent University offers a degree program yet.
The 500+ shells are filled with “mustard or sarin”. The sarin filled ones are almost certainly useless as WMDs and would have been since before the invasion. The mustard ones are of dubious, at best, utility. How many of the 500+ have been mustard and how many sarin? The 550 was for mustard-only. How close we are to accounting for those 550 depends on this ratio and it could vary from a small percentage to a large majority.
Overall though we seem to be making progress on this front. How many of those " 6500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq War"(which were itemized seperately from the 550 mustard-filled shells, in virtually the same breath, so presumably they are a seperate category entirely), containing “on the order of a thousand tons” of chemical agents have we turned up? How many liters of anthrax ouf of the 16,500 liters Saddam “could have produced” have we found? How many tons of VX? Any shells with VX in them? Overall out of the “stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent” how much has been found?
Out of the laundry list of WMD related causus belli, how many can you check off? Can you put together a percentage complete number? I’d love to see one.
It’d be interesting to see someone try firing one of these 20 year old shells from an artillery piece. What with the corroded casings, I think you’d get an effect similar to overloading a tree cannon. If anyone wanted to use this stuff, they’d have to completely replace the outer casing.
Typical liberal misinterpretation and distortion of facts. Liquid Plumber is extremely toxic. Draino would burn your eyes out. Next time you think degraded sulfur mustard isn’t a deadly threat to the American Way of Life, I suggest you pour Draino in your own eyes, just to prove the soundness of your judgement.
The problem is that they can’t be USED in 99% of those places. This method of uranium enrichment is extremely power-hungry. It can’t just plug into the wall socket wherever you park. Iraq had very few places where this kind of power could be generated and they were not low-profile. The amount of uranium this equipment could enrich when they had to pack it up and roll it out to avoid inspectors(or being spotted by spy sats) would be minimal. To take an analogy from another sphere, you need means, motive, and opportunity. Motive is given, these calutrons provide means, but opportunity would be a bitch in sanctioned, and inspected Iraq. As we’ve seen they managed to produce only small amounts of low-grade enriched uranium.
Your analogy doesn’t make sense and I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. The system you’re building is not mobile and not intended to be. The military has mobile communcations systems for the express purpose of moving them.
Saddam had a desire to build nuclear weapons and he was less than 2 years from an actual weapon. He did not abandon it under the Gulf War agreement but instead created a hidden program that included mobile calutrons. They were mobile so that they could be moved from place to place. There is no opinion involved here. That’s what happened.
I’m still looking for a reputable site that asserts that Hussein could have created a nuclear weapon within two years had we not invaded. (Provided we are talking about a weapon that employs nuclear fission or fusion in the demolition and not simply some conventional bomb that has nuclear contaminant as a dispersed agent.)