A reputable cite/site? You’ll never find one.
The only claim I’ve seen is that Saddam could have built a bomb in 2 years if he had enough weapons-grade material. No one asserted he was 2 years away from making a bomb all on his own. Most experts thought it was more like 10 years, as I recall.
However, I think just about any industrialized nation could build an atomic bomb in a couple of years if it had the fissile material to do so. Getting the fissile material in the first place is the hard part, and Saddam wasn’t close.
Not are, WERE.
http://www.voanews.com/english/2006-06-29-voa78.cfm
Time is a harsh mistress.
And in the end even the hawkish guys have to mislead to make it sound to be actual WMD. like I said before, there are weapons, but missing the mass and the destruction part. In 2003 and now, they were and are degraded, and only possibly deadly at close quarters.
Already addressed those, thanks. What three guys in a closet say isn’t indicative of how the public at large was led to understand the term by the Administration and the media.
Munitions are weapons, and 500 is a mass number of weapons. But you seem to be arguing that 500 weapons of individual destruction = one weapon of mass destruction. Sorry, but while 500 bullets may kill 500 people, they are not individually or cumulatively a weapon of mass destruction.
Ah, so Rumsfeld says it, you believe it, that settles it.
I not that he changed his mind between then and now about what constitutes a WMD. So which is the authoritative Rumsfeld - the 2004 version, or the revised standard 2006 version?
His changing his mind doesn’t change the essential fact: essentially identical weapons were discovered over two years ago, and no one, including the Administration, was trying to BS anyone into believing that these were WMDs.
But that was then and this is now. I see it as a transparent and amateurish attempt to fire up the base and rouse the rabble for the midterm elections. Guys like Santorum (who dredged this up at a very suspicious time) is nervous that he may get ousted from his seat, so he went for a grandstand play. Too bad for him, not everyone is gullible enough to fall for it.
It may be working to some small extent.
National Review on Santorum’s Prospects:
There were some pretty lofty claims made at the time about the significance of the aluminum tubes and the yellowcake buy anyway, though, weren’t there, huh? Right on this board, as a matter of fact. Remember those, do you?
Just a reminder of what even conventional weapons can do, to remind us not to set the bar for “mass destruction” too low:
Is a box of 5,000 bullets WMD? Yes or no?
Ah yes, the aluminum “centrifuge tubes” and the Nigerian yellowcake uranium that did not exist. Both claims turned out to be totally and deliberately false.
Well, we’re now firmly into a semantics argument. I’m sorry I suggested you were inconsistent.l My understanding though is that Sarin, adn mustard gas have always been considered WMDs, and that has been widely accepted. One big issue was the constant repetition by the administration stating that Hussein has used WMDs against his own people, citing attacks with such agents.
Personally, I think the administration is doing the right thing by not latching onto these weapons as being particularly meaningful.
To put it in a sentence: They were an item, they were not the item.
I has always quite clearly heard Sarin and mustard gas as WMDs.
“WMD” is a term of art. Which is worse, a nuclear weapon that kills 10,000 in a moment or a program of genocide that kills a million over a couple of years with conventional weapons?
The issue is that a WMD is a weapon that makes mass murder easy and quick.
Well, yes. I think this is a good question you raise. What is the difference? Is it valid?
I guess what makes a WMD something terrible is that it can be used as a sneak attack weapon without military action to deliver it, and that it can inflict massive casualties.
It would be difficult to say, move a conventional army of tanks and soldiers into DC to blow up the Capitol. It would be a lot easier to smuggle in a nuke or nerve gas, or mustard gas and infiltrate it into the air conditioner.
That, I think is the primary definer of a WMD: A large number of possible casualties per deployment without the need of a large military to deliver it.
But again, a 747 fits this definition. No, the more I think about it, the more I dislike the term Weapons of Mass Destruction. It is an inflammatory term, and it groups a number of weapons with diverse effects and potency under one all-inclusive word. Perhaps we should let sarin be sarin, and mustard be mustard, and fission be fission, and then sort out whether prohibitive military action is justified. We should demand the use of precise language from our elected officials.
In a perfect world.
IMHO a nuke that flattens a city is a WMD, a bio-engineered virus that spreads out and causes half the population of the planet to croak can be described as a WMD.
Chemical weapons are tricky, mustard gas and VX are waaaaay to dissimilar in effectivity to be labeled the same, a little VX goes a long way where mustard should be used by the truckload to be nearly as deadly.
At 2% letality I wonder if mustard is less effective than off-the-shelve industrial pesticides or other chemicals deployed in the same fashion. So where do you draw the line for a chemical between WMD or not-WMD?
All the rah-rah about WMDs in Iraq is a rallying point, images of mushrooom clouds were summoned to frighten the popullance into supporting a war; WMD is a manipulative term, a fear word to raise paranoia and stiffle rationality.
Well, that’s how I introduced this subthread back on page 3, IIRC - that there was a gap between the term-of-art understanding of WMD and the popular understanding of the term.
No prob.
Again, the question is who has considered them WMDs, and why. The broad public understanding of the term goes back no further than 2002, when the Administration started going on about Saddam having them. And the whole point wasn’t that WMDs were X, Y, and Z, but that they could kill lots and lots of people if terrorists used them against us. Hence the Bush quotes that I posted a few pages back.
Once again, I would posit that in the public mind, “weapons of mass destruction” means exactly its vernacular meaning, and it takes on the ‘mass’ part of the meaning by comparison with the lethality of conventional weapons, which are certainly weapons of destruction.
It certainly is a semantic debate, but I think it’s an important one. The possibility that Saddam had WMDs and might give them to terrorists was what drove the rush to war. If the public had understood Bush to be talking about weapons that probably couldn’t kill large numbers of people at once, we would have collectively wondered why he was making such a fuss.
Now that’s something I can agree with you on.
The threat was supposedly that Saddam might give WMDs to terrorists. They didn’t have a couple of years; like the 9/11 terrorists, these hypothetical terrorists equipped with Saddam’s WMDs would have had one shot. So if each terrorist is carrying a weapon that can probably kill no more people than one can kill with a machine gun, we’ve got no threat.
Exactly. And mustard gas doesn’t.
I agree with all that you’re saying here.
No, they have to be NBC.
OK, then a question for you - when Saddam used mustard gas (and sarin) on the [URL=http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76857,00.html]Kurds, did that count as a WMD, or not?
Regards,
Shodan
Only the sarin.
These mustard gas shells can no longer be used as intended anyway. It’s like finding wet firecrackers and calling them fireworks. they USED to be fireworks (of the lowest grade), now they’re just garbage.
I don’t know why I bother, since it never helps, but you are incorrect about the mustard gas.
As of 2003, the inspectors determined that Iraqi mustard gas was still of a very high quality.
In other words, both the sarin and the mustard gas were WMD.
:shrugs:
As if it were going to make any difference.
Regards,
Shodan
Perhaps you shouldn’t bother because you lack critical thinking skills?
I mean, for chrissakes…
Now, how do you suppose the inspectors might have concluded the agent was of high quality without having seen the shells (look up “not”, “account”, and “for” in a dictionary, if it helps)? Perhaps they were referring to shells already accounted for, and extrapolating? Or maybe they were simply referring to the shells they had inspected? Whatever this somewhat unclear statement could mean, it could not mean they had inspected the shells that they could not account for.
Now that that they have accounted for them, they have been described as DEGRADED. That means, you see, that a three-year-old statement relating to munitions unaccounted for does not trump the assessment of those who, presently, have had the opportunity to actually inspect the munitions and determine that, again, THEY ARE DEGRADED.
How would they know it was still high quality if they couldn’t find it? This is not a report on THESE mustard shells. Your post is misleading.
The really ironic thing about your use of this particular cite is that it summarizes the finding a the team led by David Kay – the same David Kay who has publicly stated that THESE mustard shells are degraded and that the sulfur mustard inside them can no longer do anything more than burn your skin if you touch it. Is Kay now lying?
As I said before, it doesn’t do any good.
Regards,
Shodan