I suppose we’ll never 100% know for certain, but my guess is that he was holding them in reserve in case the Iranians took the opportunity to make a push into Iraqi territory or in case he couldn’t put down the Shiite insurgency conventionally.
Come again now?
Where is this policy? I’ve never heard of such a thing- cite?
Certainly there’s an implied threat of the US responding to a nuclear attack with nuclear force- that’s been damn clear since the fifties, even if it’s not written down. But are you really contending that we’d respond with biological weapons to a biological weapon attack? Or are you contending that we’d respond with chemical weapons, had Saddam used them against us? I grant you that we’re likely to respond to nuclear weapons in kind, though I don’t know of a policy stating that. But I think we’d respond very differently to different kinds of WMDs.
Yeah, I would like a cite to, since I believe the CWC prohibits use of chemical weapons, and since we’re signatories to it, we can’t have an official policy allowing the use of chemical weapons (unofficially, who knows?).
My mistake. Apparently the CWC didn’t enter into effect until after the Gulf War.
Here’s a paper on US policy regarding attacks with weapons of mass destruction against US forces:
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj03/spr03/conley.html
In brief, it says that our policy is one of ambiguity, but that there is an implied threat that we will use nuclear weapons in response to an attack using weapons of mass destruction against US forces.
Not to hijack this thread but I suspect their BAD miscalculation was Saddam’s fault.
Dictators tend to be mistrustful of their military. Stalin wiped out his military leadership badly and the Soviets suffered massively as a result.
Saddam too cleared his military of competent commanders. As a result Saddam was left with a bunch of weenie “yes men” around him. I seriously doubt anyone left was able to face him and tell him the truth that the US military would clean his clock (either those left lacked the balls and/or were so incompetent to realize this obvious truth).
I believe it was a combination of practical and political. If Saddam had modified the scuds to deliver an NBC strike, he would have used them in that role. As someone else mentioned up thread, they were not modified at that time, so he was left with conventional means of delivery and that’s where the practical comes into play.
What ever he was using would have been delivered by aircraft or artillery. His airforce lasted pretty much one afternoon before the survivors fled to Iran and Artillery was problematic due to SEAD operations and the ground war not kicking off for 3 weeks after the air war began.
Giving him the bennifit of the doubt and he is able to get some sort of surprise NBC strike, how much does he actually have on hand, enough to slime a Kurdish village under ideal conditions, no problem, actual troops who train for this happening on the level of a soviet slimeing, might be useless, may cause some casualties but the end result is the same.
Which brings us to the political side of war. By keeping it clean he is able to muster some sympathy from percieved American bullying in the rest of the world and possibly appeal to both Russia and China to keep Iraq from being occupied ten years earlier as well, leverage the Arab world into moderating influence for the same reasons.
Declan
The implied US policy for quite a while has been that if the US or our allies were attacked with any kind of WMD we would reply in kind. Since, in theory (wink wink, nudge nudge) the US only has one type of WMD to reply with, the implication has been that we’d reply with nuclear weapons to any such attack. It’s ambiguous, as I believe Captain Amazing’s cite shows.
If you still don’t believe it I’m sure I can dig up a cite for this, though it’s pretty well known, honestly.
Not at all…I’m sorry for the confusion. The US’s ‘reply in kind’ implies we’d use nuclear weapons to ANY kind of WMD attack, since, again in theory, the US only has nukes…we don’t, supposedly (:dubious:) have chemical or biological weapons to reply with. So, had Saddam attacked us with chemical or biological WMD, and had we chosen to ‘reply in kind’, we would have used a nuclear weapon in response.
-XT
Pretty sure the US has both chemical and biological weapons in stock.
Bio weapons have just seed stock on hand for defensive research, most if not all of the chemical weapons, persistent and non persistent were decommed back in the nineties. During the latter part of the eighties, American NBC stocks were transitioning to binary delivery systems, to enable safe storage and handling of the agents.
Regardless of the weapon used, if it causes a mass casualty event, the response in the present should be nuclear, it’s the cleaner option.
Declan
At the start of GW1 Mrs Thatcher was in charge. The Lady was most definitely not for turning.
People asked you for a cite, not a platitude. Got anything?
Actually, they didn’t. IIRC it was on news analysis shows.
And it wasn’t a platitude, it was a riff on one of Mrs T’s more famous sayings. As for her being in charge, remember “Now is not the time to go wobbly, George”?
How would he have used gas against Israel? He couldn’t hit Israel with a SCUD.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, BG. Unless I’m misremembering the sound of a scud flying a hundred yards above my house.
Just the same ol’ same ol’ and why fact-checking these sorts of discussions is required.
Of course Sadaam hit Israel with scuds. Quite a few.
Same ol’, same ol’.
Uh, Coalition forces penetrated pretty deep into southern Iraq. My unit was poised to perform a forward-passage-of-lines through the 2nd ACR at BMNT on the 28th of February. The order to move out never came.
Saddam’s chemical weapons capability amounted to mixing stuff up actually on the battlefield (as they couldn’t manufacture stuff that would last more than 24 hours due to contamination, lack of correct tech etc.) and firing it out of artillery pieces. Iraq never had the tech to put the stuff into the business end of a missile and fire it anywhere. Iraq’s “WMD” amonted to battlefield munitions only.
I did some business in Israel about a year or two after the Scud attacks. Speaking with people who witnessed the attacks, it is my impression that the success of the Patriot anti-missile systems was wildly exaggerated in the US media.(as in Baghdad Bob level of misinformation) While damage was limited due to smallish warheads, nobody thought that the countermeasures were effective in the least.
True, but no-one really expected it to work - everyone knew it was untested, experimental technology.
The thought was appreciated, though.