Jesus, I suck. I fucked up my calculations–the vapor pressure of water is 23.74 mm Hg at room temperature; the vapor pressure of ethanol is 59.02 mm Hg at room temperature. The glycerol value was taken from here and is for 50 deg. C which is considerably higher than room temperature. Maybe I will should swear off math after consuming a few Guinnesses. Sheesh.
I agree that ‘WMD’ by any definition (including those Squink linked to) covers such a range that its use confuses more than it informs. But I think what I’d do is just go back to the individual terms: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, and so forth.
But not ‘NBC weapons’ in a big lump, because the differences in scale amongst those are part of what makes that WMD definition anti-informative, if you will.
Just as a general rule, if you won’t read a cite, it is not quite kosher to pretend that a cite has not been provided.
You denied it here -
:shrugs:
Either someone hijacked your account, or you don’t read your own posts, or you were proven wrong and won’t admit it.
The cites provided all stated that WMDs had been used to kill Kurds, which you said was “vile” but not WMD. One of the (the last) was the cite for the rest of the information I quoted, but since you didn’t read it, you wouldn’t know that.
They also mentioned that the WMD used against the Kurds caused deaths and casualties numbering in the tens of thousands, which seems to put paid to your obviously silly contention that Saddam’s mustard gas and sarin aren’t really WMD.
Regards,
Shodan
That, unfortunately for you, is a rule you just made up this morning while shaving.
Here’s how a cite works on this here board:
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You quote that part of the source that provides the needed support to your argument.
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You link to the source so that people can know where your quote came from, verify the veracity of quote and source for themselves, and make sure you’re not taking it out of context or otherwise use it in a way that’s not supported by a fuller reading of the source.
But no one is obliged to read more of the source than you quote. And if you provide a pile of links without any indication of how each one supports your case, that holds even more strongly.
The underlying principle here is that you’re supposed to make your own case; I just have to rebut it.
Your expecting me to read your linkfest amounts to your expecting me to go through the assorted links, find whatever it is that seems to best support your case, state what that case is in a form I can rebut, and then finally rebut the damned thing.
IOW, you’re expecting me to make your case for you.
I’m sorry, Shodan, but you’ve got to make your own stupid argument. Which you’re quite capable of doing on your own.
You are continuing to elide the issue that several people have pointed out; that chemicals are only WMD’s when combined with massive delivery systems like airplanes, helicopters, or aircraft batteries. Were they WMD when used against the Kurds? Yes, because they were deployed massively. Are they WMD when they’re deployed in briefcases? No, of course not. If you assert these two cases are the same, that’s a textbook fallacy of equivocation, and of course the threat of terrorist chemical WMD’s is the fallacy used to justify the war.
“aircraft” was intended to be “artillery”.
Apparently you didn’t read the very words you quoted here. I’ve bolded key phrases to make them stand out.
You provided a cite that described an attack on the Kurds that caused a few people to die. That was, as I said, vile, but not mass destruction.
I take no stand on whether some other attack on the Kurds used weapons of mass destruction, and as I am explaining for the second time now, the passage you quote should not be interpreted as an extrapolation from “the attack described here wasn’t indicative of the use of weapons of mass destruction” to “Saddam never used such weapons against the Kurds.”
Please quit twisting my words. You can say all you want to that they’re a blanket denial that Saddam ever used weapons of mass destruction on the Kurds, but that doesn’t make it true.
Please quote. As I’ve said, I’m NOT going to go through all your links, dig up the best evidence supporting your argument, form that argument, and then rebut it.
If you want to be lazy, that’s your problem, not mine.
When come back, bring argument. (I shouldn’t have to say that twice.)
One good reason to lump NBC weapons together is that all of them contaminate the area where they are used. This has tactical implications on the battlefield. A large conventional bomb may actually kill more people than a mustard gas artillery shell, but the artillery shell also can make a particular area of the battlefield impassible to unprotected troops for hours or days afterwards.
This has implications if these types of weapons are used by terrorists. A truck bomb detonated in Lower Manhattan would kill many people, but outside the immediate blast radius the city could return to business as usual within a few days. However much smaller “dirty bomb” could spread dangerous radioactive dust over many blocks, rendering them uninhabitable for weeks or months. The actual death toll might be smaller, but the economic impact would be much larger.
So there’s definitely a compelling reason to keep NBC materials out of the hands of terrorists. They have the potential to be used as force multipliers, turning small attacks into major ones. Consider the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The five men who released the gas managed to kill or injure over a thousand people.
However, the shells mentioned in the OP contained **degraded ** chemical agents. So, while technically they are NBC munitions, they could not have been used effectively on the battlefield or in a terrorist attack. The argument over whether or not Iraq possessed WMDs isn’t some abstract philosophical exercise. The question is “Were these weapons a danger to the United States and Iraq’s neighbors or not?” An Iraq with an active nuclear weapons program and large hidden stockpiles of fresh chemical agents would have posed a greater threat to regional and global security than an Iraq armed with just conventional weapons. The Bush administration sold the war based on that premise. And that premise was utterly, utterly wrong.
These were artillery shells we were talking about.
And RT - there seems to be no point in providing cites if you won’t read them.
Regards,
Shodan
If you look at post #78, I have provided some cites that contradict this assertion. One Pentagon spokesman said that he considered that these WMD could constitute a danger to our troops in the field; another part of the declassified report mentioned that the chemical agents involved were still potentially deadly, and the report mentioned that they could be sold on the black market for use by terrorists.
Yes, I know Diogenes and some others are insisting loudly that these are harmless, but he and they are wrong.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, and I’ll explain it again. Artillery shells in the hands of terrorists are not WMD’s because terrorists do not possess mass delivery systems (a battery of artillery throwing many shells). Chemical artillery shells are area denial weapons, not weapons of mass destruction.
If you are arguing that terrorists, by definition, cannot possess WMD, that seems like a semantic distinction of no particular use. Those who died and were injured in the sarin attack in Tokyo are no better off by being reassured that it wasn’t WMD that was used to attack them.
If you believe that simply calling it something different improves the situation, I am afraid I don’t see your point. Those that died in 9/11 were not subject to WMD attacks - does that mean we don’t need to worry about airplanes being used by terrorists?
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan, if you’re going to continue to beat this dead horse, I’d appreciate your response to my question of post #24.
These “Iraqi WMD’s” have been debunked. Only the unscrupulous and the confused are repeating the claim.
Which one are you? Unscrupulous, confused, both, or am I missing something? I see you grasping for discrepancies in this story, and in the explanations – hoping that you’ll find enough straw to stop the tide of truth, but I can’t see such behavior as rational. Help me understand.
Shodan, the man (maybe woman?) is merely asking you to quote from them in the thread itself so as to make things easier on him. If you choose to quote from your cites in your posts, people are pretty much forced to read what you’re citing.
Nobody said that. What BrainWreck said was that binary spin-to-mix sarin shells, in the hands of terrorists lacking a howitzer, are not weapons of mass destruction. That is perhaps debatable, but it is not even close to as moronic as you are trying to make it sound.
This is exactly my point–an airplane can be a weapon that causes great carnage. It might be accurate to call it a WMD, in light of the events of 9/11. Now, do we invade nations we don’t like that possess airplanes? Cuba has airplanes, why not them? What if they gave them to terrorists?
The point is this: in the current political climate, the term WMD is heavily loaded. I feel that it serves to do little except inflame panic in the general populace when such panic is not necessarily justified. Calling a weapon by its name (“mustard gas”) rather than lumping it in with a bunch of other substances that have dissimilar effects (“WMD”) means that as a populace we can make rational decisions with respect to projection of military force and not be subject to our own instinctive fear. WMD is a marketing term nowadays, and honestly, what kind of person acts as a salesman for war?
Right, I understood that, but it still seems like a distinction without a difference. The sarin in Tokyo came from people with no howitzers, too.
And I wouldn’t necessarily assume that al-Queda in Iraq or Afghanistan couldn’t get hold of a howitzer, either.
This is a little silly. There was nothing in the protocols that Saddam signed at the end of the first Gulf War that said he couldn’t have commercial airliners. And it is Saddam’s failure to abide by the terms of the cease-fire that forbade him to have things that anyone would agree were WMD - like the chemical munitions he used to kill and maim tens of thousands of Kurds - that caused the US to invade and overthrow him.
Perhaps true, but much of the loading comes from the attempts by the Bush-bashers to come up with some quibble that justifies a definition of “WMD” like the one I mentioned earlier -
Because I honestly believe the controlling syllogism is as follows -
[ul][li]Bush lied when he said there were WMD in Iraq[/li][li]Mustard gas and sarin were found in Iraq[/li][li]Ergo, mustard gas and sarin are not WMD[/ul][/li]
I don’t think so. What WMD have in common is that they are subject to a special level of restriction that conventional weapons are not. Nobody cared if Saddam had AK-47s (or commercial airliners). But the cease-fire specifically called for him to disarm himself of his NBC weapons and programs. And he didn’t do it, as this discovery makes clear. And there are all kinds of treaties restricting WMD that are not applied to bombs and guns and artillery.
Because, as was mentioned earlier in the discussion of how WMDs poison the environment, there is a special horror to the use of WMDs that does not apply somehow to bullets. You can shoot someone, and he dies. But then you can still go into the area where he was shot ten minutes later and not die from contamination.
That’s one of the reasons why the use of WMD is prohibited by the laws of war. It’s worse than conventional arms. And it seems to me to be a useful distinction to be kept in mind. Saddam had WMD, he used them against civilians, he promised to rid himself of all of them when he lost Gulf War I, and then he didn’t do it. He hid them, or he told somebody else to hide them and forgot where they were, or sent them off to Syria, or something - but we are now completely sure that he did, in fact, have WMD. Just like Bush said he did. Granted, not in the huge stockpiles that almost everyone expected, but he had them.
Not something you can nitpick away.
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, this “discovery” does not make that clear, at all. The original report was that we had found ±500 individual shells in small groups, scattered around the countryside, some simply buried without protection, none actually stored securely in a magazine.
That does not seem to indicate so much that Hussein had refused to disarm as that his scattered and disorganized military had lost control (or, perhaps, simply lost) a number of munitions following the chaos of the First Gulf War. (This is especially true given that all the shells appear to predate 1991 and are, therefore, not evidence that he was actually continuing to produce new weapons.)
Remembering that Shodan again evades stating the true case which Bush made. Let the record show it was never that: Saddam has WMD = The US must invade.
In fact, it was presented that:
- Saddam has close working links with international terrorism,
- Saddam is on the very cusp of actively arming Al-Quaeda
- Saddam will arm Al-Q from his rich portfolio of Chemical, Biological and Nuclear weapons.
Failure of any one of these propositions invalidates the case for war. See how that works?
For example the absence of any connection between Saddam and Al-Q does it. Thereby obliging decent people to oppose the actions of US forces and applaud and pray for their every defeat.
Actually, the dishonesty of the creators of this war do not “oblige” anyone to “applaud” or “pray for” their every defeat.
That is off-topic for this thread. You are welcome to advance that position in a new thread, but it does not belong here as a way to kick off an additional 12 page hijack.
[ /Moderating ]
I suppose it’s fortunate that I didn’t argue that, then. I’ll leave you to that strawman.
Are they somehow better off by being reassured that it was in fact WMD? Should the US have invaded Tokyo?
It depends on who you are. If you want to justify invading Iraq, it certainly does improve your situation to label all chemical munitions as WMD’s. It certainly benefitted Bush’s situation, at least temporarily. That’s the point.
If we’re worried about airplanes used by terrorists… um… can you remind us again of what role Iraq played in 9/11?
First you’d have to provide one.
A link, without any explanation of what it contains and why it’s important, is not a cite in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s like writing an article and listing a book in your bibliography, without actually making specific reference to the book in your article. And then when someone finds a hole in your reasoning in the article, you say, “Didn’t you read that book? Everything you need is in there. There’s no point in providing a bibliography if you’re not going to read the books I list in it.”
So I’m still not going to do your work for you.