…except that they probably didn’t exist prior to the US invasion. It seems that at least insurgent group has decided to enhance its improvised explosive devices with chlorine.
So now, the factions disputing what is rapidly becoming an all-out civil war seem to be adopting chemical weapons as well. Lovely. Didn’t we supposedly unseat Saddam to prevent him from doing this sort of thing? I seem to dimly remember the administration saying something about that.
Lest anyone think this is nothing more than a Bush-bash, well, it is, sort of, but let’s face it, there are some seriously deranged individuals fighting each other in Iraq. I’m not so naive as to think that some poor schmuck is less dead from explosives than from a chemical attack, but jeepers, the inhumanity. I don’t recall any previous civil conflicts that have resorted to chemical attacks on civilians; if so there’s a nice little milestone achieved. I’m sure the fine, knowledgable folks here will correct me if I’m wrong on that.
Well, that’s an interesting cite, and I’ll read it at length later, but it would appear that the various mentions of the use of chemical weapons were by organized armies against each other. The milestone I was referring to is the use of such weaponsin an insurrection or civil conflict. Sorry if I missed some examples of such from your reference.
True enough; they’ve definitely changed the definition there.
Ahh, sorry. The gases and such have only been around since WWI, so there’s not a lot of history to dig through for precedents. However
Unfortunately, there’s no mention which agents were used.
Wikipedia has a nice list of occasions on which Mustard gas was used
Some of these probably fit the requirements for an insurrection or civil war.
The use of Chlorine as a CW agent is much harder to track down, as it has so many other uses.
Hell, it happened in Iraq. On March 16, 1988. Saddam gassed the Kurds in a place called Halabjah:
Iraq quickly found itself bogged down in one of the longest and most destructive wars of attrition of the twentieth century, with atrocities committed on both sides. During the war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish separatists. On March 16, 1988 Iraqi troops, on orders from Saddam to stop a Kurdish uprising, attacked the Kurdish town of Halabjah with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents killing 5,000 people, mostly women and children. (see Halabja poison gas attack) Dissenting opinions dispute the numbers and have said the incident was actually a battle in the Iran–Iraq war where chemical weapons were used on both sides and a significant portion of the fatalities were caused by the Iranian weapons.
Well, fair enough, but then what’s the point of calling them “stink bombs,” instead of simply “poisonous shrapnel bombs” --or even just “bombs” for that matter? When I think of a “stink bomb,” I think of something sold next to the “itching powder” in the Johnson Smith Novelties catalog; poison and shrapnel don’t immediately spring to mind. Why choose to emphasize the “stink” aspect? Did the Chinese have the capacity to create stinkless poison shrapnel weapons, and just chose not to? Was the stink just their way of adding insult to injury?
I’d thought about Halabjah, but it was carried out by the Iraqi army, and as the cite says, it’s considered part of the Iran-Iraq conflict, not to mention that one of the justifications of the US invasion was supposedly to prevent things like that from happening again.
Close enough, though; I’ll accept it. I’m not gonna fight in a thread where I’m basically objecting to fighting to begin with.
Your basic premise here is “this sucks”. I agree with you wholeheartedly. We never should have invaded. Once we toppled the existing government, an average 10th grade Western Civ student should have been able to predict chaos would ensue…yet somehow this eluded our Fuckwit in Chief. Now that one faction has used chemical weapons, the other sides will be more likely to return the favor. Clusterfuck any way you slice it. Plus, we continue to rattle sabers at Iran. Not really seeing how this ends well for anybody…
Well, since Saddam used Nerve gas on his own people (the Kurds) not only did they exist prior to the US Invasion, but they were used in a “civil conflict”.
You do know that after Operation Desert Storm, the UN found and destroyed tens of thousands of tonnes of WMD that Saddam had, don’t you?
Yes, everyone knows that. Particularly as we gave them to him in the first place in the form of the means to make them and the precursors including, thanks to the USA, anthrax, West Nile virus and botulism. And a big shout out for the the UK for the chlorine factory to make mustard gas. But at the time he was our man and we didn’t give a flying fuck who he gassed so long as he kept fighting Iran.
The crocodile tears came later when he slipped our leash.
For the first part, I guess you missed the bit in my previous post where I said I’d accept Halabjah as an example. For the second part, you do know that after the invasion the US military apparently found no sign of any usable chemical weapons in Iraq, right?