It would be nice to get some info. about when, these shells were manufactured. It would appear that, over the course of the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqis worked to improve their chemical weapons technology, but up to the late 80’s, at least, the shelf life of at least some portion of their chemical munitions was sub-par at best, due to process issues.
I’m also interested to know another thing, given these new things I’ve learned regarding shelf-life of dangerous agents like sarin: Say the chemicals the Iraqis were churning out just prior to Gulf War I (and, presumably, they were cooking up to gas more Kurds or whoever) were good by the standards of Iraqi weapons. If all manufacture ceased around the end of GWI, would any of it be any good by 2001?
OK, so we seem to have pretty much concluded that:
These are not WMDs.
They are probably, but not definitely, unusable as designed due to degradation.
They were probably not a stockpile, but rather discarded munitions, due to them being found a couple at a time.
So, they are not a conventional military threat, but how threatening are they in the hands of terrorists? As we have found them scattered around the country it is more than likely that many more of them exist, possibly many times the number we have already found. Thus it is also likely that the terrorists have or will have several of them. What can they do with them?
The one used as a roadside bomb showed that they pretty much suck this way, but what other options are there? I believe that for the weapon to activate as intended (mixing of chemicals to produce the dangerous ones) they must be fired from a cannon. To my knowledge the insurgents have not used one of these and probably have no access to them. Are there any chemical mortars? This strikes me as a stupid idea (limited range, possibility of it blowing back at you), but I wouldn’t put it past weapons designers (hell, we made a nuclear equivalent). If so, that would be much more of a concern. Lastly, is it possible to take apart these shells and jury rig some sort of mechanism to effectively mix/disperse them?
The answer to these questions would tell us whether we should be saying, “Oh look, Bill found another one of 'em. Take it over to storage.” or “Scour the countryside, we have to get these things out of the hands of the enemy!”
I’m reading through Cobra II right now, and it actually talks about how involved Cheney and Rumsfield were in the planning. Just constantly beating on General Franks to reduce all forces involved. And if the defeat was early, cut off the flow of reinforcements. While he may have been the COO, I’m pretty sure he had a lot to do with the planning.
And they cut the Joint Chiefs out of a lot of it. Again, this is just based on what I’ve read so far.
As Chief Operating Officer, he would certainly have been at the level to plan troop sizes, which divisions to deploy, etc. I just have the feeling from other stuff I have read that he did not think up the idea of invading Iraq. He was in charge of implementation, not strategic planning. (I could also be wrong, but I have not yet seen anything from prior to September 2001–when most of this idiocy was dreamed up–that would have indicated that he was participating at that level.)
Yeah. I know. That is why he got picked for Secretary of Defense. I am only saying that I am not sure that he was so much a central figure as someone who came along for the ride. (Note that they got him to sign it; they did not get him to write it. I have seen nothing else he has written that places him at the center.)
I certainly cannot prove that point and I’m not going to spend hours defending it. It was an observation in passing which, as I already noted, could be a mistake.
(1) Well, for a “terrorist regime” that is overthrown, we seem to have a lot more terrorism in Iraq than we did before.
(2) Wow, so for our $320 billion so far, we’ve gotten 500 shell casings full of decomposed goo! What a bargain…That’s less than a billion dollars a casing! And, we have no evidence that they are not in the hands of terrorists due to some crack work on the administration’s part to actually secure weapons sites. It seems like we are benefitting instead from the fact that they can’t be bothered with them. [Besides which, our own CIA had concluded that it was unlikely that Saddam would give or sell WMDs to terrorists (particularly ones who seem to have a nasty habit of turning on their former suppliers like ObL)…which it hardly takes a crack psychologist to figure out.]
Give it up, Shodan. Even most of your right-wing friends won’t defend this one.
Most of Santorum’s verbal santorum has already been covered, but this particular line stuck out:
People bought that ? It was considered a reasonable idea that Saddam Hussein would relinquish control of a prized strategic asset like that ? Sheesh, this nation lost its head. Be that as it may, now that we have had 3 years to sift through the rubble, can you produce a cite for an instance of this actually, y’know, happening in the real world ?
See above. Unless there’s some sort of evidence of WMDs actually being sold to AQ or its ilk - or evidence of plans of doing so - those shells would still be quietly rusting away.
Serious overstatement. Hussein made a big deal of publicly given some money to a few of the families of suicide bombers in Israel–always after the fact, and never as a prior incentive; it was pretty random–and he tried to enlist “pan-Arabian” support by making big talk about attacking Israel (and firing a couple of rather ineffective Scuds at Israel during the first Gulf War).
These random incidents are now played up as “supporting terrorism” despite the fact that he never actually worked with any serious terrorist groups and after three years of poking around in his archives we have still never found any evidence that her ever did work with or give money or weapons to any terrorist organizations.
Quietly? You’ve misunderestimated Saddam’s cunning plan. I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I reveal that at the behest of the executive, the CIA is investigating the danger to American youth of tetanus. It causes 300,000 to 500,000 deaths a year you know. I’ll say no more as I’m sure the OP et al will keep the board better updated on the need to take urgent steps to curtail this threat.
This is my impression too, but on another board, I’m engaged in an enthusiastic argument over this point. It’s hard to google a negative, though: do you have some good cites that explain Hussein’s connections to terrorism?
Wiki has an article And Stephen Hayes has been running a series in the Weekly Standard, for whatever you believe that is worth. I haven’t read the whole thing, but it seems to be based mostly on documents captured in post-war Iraq.
Well, most people consider nerve gas and mustard gas to be WMD.
As others have already noted, Sarin has a shelf-life of about 6 months. The weapons detailed in the Ground Intelligence Report are approximately 20 years old. Ergo, the Sarin in those shells does not constitute a WMD by any definition.
Please describe how these spoiled munitions could be used by a terrorist to cause mass casualties. Then provide evidence that Sadaam had ties to terrorists and would be willing to give them said spoiled munitions. Then explain why it was worth spending $400 billion we don’t have and ending the lives of thousands upon thousands of people to stop it.
Are you being intentionally obtuse? Chemical shells qualify as WMDs because they are designed to disperse highly toxic gases, killing or causing horrific injuries over a wide area. However, after the sarin or whatever degrades, the gases that the shell will disperse will no longer be effective at killing or causing horrific injuries even at low levels of exposure. That doesn’t mean that the shell isn’t still hazardous, or a potential weapon. It does, after all, still contain an explosive charge, and could be used to make an IED. And, I would imagine that the degraded sarin inside is still rather toxic sludge, even if it won’t behave in such a way as to make an effective chemical weapon. Its composition might well cause additional fear relative to a strictly conventional explosive, too, which might make it attractive to a terrorist.
So, to recap:
Chemical shell prior to its best before date: WMD
Chemical shell after its best before date: not WMD, but still a potential weapon
Another point to make is that it also depends not on what the weapon is, but the amount of it. Anything is a weapon of mass destruction if there’s enough of it/enough ammunition; You can’t claim “many people were killed by sarin gas here, therefore sarin gas in any amount is a WMD” without also saying the same about tanks, guns, knives. Is there enough non-degraded sarin in these shells to be considered a WPD?