Iraq had WMD After All... 5000 of Them

ltstanfo

ltstanfo

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http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0

Quite an interesting read. Be sure to review the whole article before replying. Talk about dirty hands all around (western countries). No wonder the info was kept from the public.

While not a complete pass, historians will now have to reconsider the claims of WMD by the Bush administration and all the political bickering that ensued (IMO). I will be most interested to see how much media coverage this article gets.

Regards,
Ltstanfo
 
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5000. That's not much, but it's probably not all either. That sort of stuff can go missing for decades. The US is still finding chemical weapons from WWI in its borders like this story from a few years back.
And that's not to mention all the waste from the arm'y nuclear program including barrels of nasty stuff dumped in coastal waters.
 
ltstanfo said:
While not a complete pass, historians will now have to reconsider the claims of WMD by the Bush administration and all the political bickering that ensued (IMO). I will be most interested to see how much media coverage this article gets.
Click to expand...

I don't really think it prompts much reconsideration of Bush's invasion justifications. His premise was that there were active development programs that needed to be stopped because they presented a current threat. These are all pre-1991 weapons we sold/built/taught them which had been improperly disposed of after not having been used. Sure, they're a threat to the environment, and the poor bastards who accidentally stumble across them... But they are clearly not battle-ready weapons or part of an active program.

This does seem to be getting more and more media coverage, though. Which should, at least, be good for getting proper treatment for said poor bastards who stumbled across these and were injured.
 
What Ilwrath said. There's little reason to believe this is just nothing more then some forgotten stockpiles from the Iran-Iraq war. Considering some of those who stumbled across them came into direct contact with the stuff and didn't die instantly, it's also fair to say that the chemicals degraded considerably. That too was part of the arguments against invasion, that the old stockpiles were of no use militarily and since it was rather obvious that there were no factories building new stockpiles there was absolutely no reason to believe there was any urgency to investigate any further never mind invade. Now thanks to this colossal blunder more Americans died in Iraq than in the 9/11 terror attacks and now have to deal with ISIS. And to be honest, it's not likely to end there either. Why would anyone try to use this story about rusted out chemical shells as justification for something that was clearly so wrong on such an epic scale. :rolleyes:
 
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts...s Picks&utm_campaign=2014_EditorsPicks15/10RS

The focus on this old stockpile also distorts how the Bush White House sold the war. Saddam's chemical weapons were certainly a component of that argument, but his biological and nuclear programs were of much greater importance to Bush's lieutenants. When, for example, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U.N. Security Council to press the case for war, it was a vial of anthrax, not sarin, that he brandished before the body.

And nothing in Chivers's story suggests those vials of anthrax existed.
Click to expand...

In other words, Colin Powell's political career is still very much dead.
 
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