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Pentagon Reportedly Hushed Up Chemical Weapons Finds In Iraq
mr_mischief writes "Multiple sources report that the US found remnants of WMD programs, namely chemical weapons, in Iraq after all. Many US soldiers were injured by them, in fact. The Times reports: "From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein's rule. In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act."
That wasn't missing in the summary as submitted, but editors will edit.
That's really just the beginning of the story. Why the cover-up of US troops being injured by them? Why weren't they disposed of according to international accords on chemical weapons? Are we sure they were all destroyed before ISIL started scrounging old bases and ammo dumps?
Here's the original submission. If you read the multiple articles linked from the original or edited summaries you'll see that just finding them was far from the end of the story.
There were warehouses of chemical weapons in Iraq before Gulf War 2 - everyone knew about them, the UN inspectors went to those warehouses first, inventoried them, and sealed them. Saddam was supposed to have destroyed those weapons, by treaty, but that wasn't the point of contention as they were pretty old by then, some left over from the Iran-Iraq war (some even US-made), and likely not useful. We were looking for newly made chemical weapons.
The baffling thing is: why weren't these chemical weapons destroyed in the 10 years we were in Iraq? That makes no sense at all to me. WTF? So now ISIS has a warehouse or two of Iraqi chemical weapons. We went to war partially to prevent just that - terrorists getting WMDs not because Saddam was selling them directly, but because shit happens. Well, shit happened. What were we doing for 10 years following going into Iraq for the stated purpose of destroying these WMDs?
Fortunately, they may all be so old that they're only a danger to ISIS. It's really any WMDs made more recently that are a threat. If Saddam actually had a weapons program active soon before the war, the weapons likely ended up in Syria - certainly Iraqi military convoys carrying something crossed into Syria in the weeks before we attacked - but ISIS is strong in Syria too. Guess we'll find out soon enough.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I've been on a SEAL/SpecialOps book kick for the last few years and some of the operators that went into Iraq in the early days and were tasked with finding these WMD's on the front end do think they found evidence of developmental weapons programs in addition to the caches of already developed weapons. They basically conclude that stuff was being developed, and hurriedly dismantled and relocated, in country as well as likely to Syria. One of them goes as far as suggesting the only effect of the "diplomatic process" before the war was giving Hussein the time to hide the evidence. The NYT piece only alludes to the old chem weapons they used against Iran, but the SEALS seem to think the stuff they found was part of development programs that were active before the war.
I guess what's really news is how many chem weapons were still available and the extent to which the Pentagon went to keep it hush. As to why, I can only guess.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
We did find chemical weapons. Small quantities well past its shelf life, though. It was pretty obvious that despite some old stockpiles here and there, the Iraqi government hadn't been pursuing a WMD program for many years. This revelation doesn't change the fact that our causus belli was basically a fiction.
The article is wrong about why we kept it quite, though. The Iraqi army had a history of burying weapons systems up to and including attack aircraft in the desert sand. We didn't want local militias going out to look for chemical weapons that we thought might actually be out there. If we had found actual evidence of a WMD program, the government might have publicized it, but that wasn't the case.
More interestingly, we were on the Iranian border for a time, and we were actively fighting with irregulars trying to cross the border and intercepting weapons shipments. Even having been there, I still don't know what to believe about what I saw.
When they searched the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist, they uncovered roughly 2,000 pages of documents. You see them here being brought out of the home and placed in U.N. hands. Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq's nuclear program. . . This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells . . . The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers. . . . First, you will recall that it took UNSCOM four long and frustrating years to pry - to pry - an admission out of Iraq that it had biological weapons. . . One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.
The Bush administration claimed that Iraq had biological, chemical, and maybe nuclear weapons. As for biological weapons, especially the mobile weapons factories, were never found. The nuclear weapons were also never found as Iraq never had the capability. As for chemical weapons, the world has known that Iraq already had mustard gas and sarin since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. The claim by the Bush administration was that they were manufacturing more and newer chemical ones. This was never substantiated. Most likely US soldiers uncovered the old mustard gas and sarin stockpiles.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As to why, I can only guess.
You (or the SEAL books you refer to) make several contentions:
1) Iraq was actively engaged in new WMD production prior to the American invasion
2) The "diplomatic process" was intended (by whom?) to give Hussein time to hide this
3) The evidence as dismantled and relocated, likely to Syria
4) And the one we all agree on: the old stockpiles were found in Iraq
I've heard these claims before, particularly the one about Syria. The problem for anyone who takes this line of attack is explaining why the Bush Administration didn't put any of this together to make a case for the invasion and occupation after it was all discovered?
So what's your guess as to why the Bush Administration kept all this quiet?
Were they completely incompetent and let the military cover things up? If that's the case, why did the military cover things up?
Did Administration officials know all this--including the stockpiles etc being moved to Syria--and cover it up for their own reasons? If so, what were they? "A momentary lapse of reason" won't cover it. What is the plausible strategic, tactical, diplomatic or political reason for an Administration that made the invasion of Iraq a signature policy based on a pretext that was widely believed to be false to cover up evidence that would have proven that pretext substantially true?
This is the question that has to be answered.
Finally: if all the WMDs were moved to Syria, why are these WMDs still all over Iraq? (they were presumably in a lot better shape in 2002 than they are today, twelve years later.)
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"If you like your plan, you can keep it. Period." ..later..
"That's not what I said. What I said was.."
No sane person is going to think an "old" WMD is just fine and a "new" WMD is not. Old or new, if the basis for the war was that Iraq had WMDs in its possession, this fits the bill. Even if the US and Europe are implicated in the manufacture of them, they were still in Iraq's possession. It's irrelevant either way at this point, we left. There's no reason to spin it unless we're going to try and hold someone accountable for them being in Iraq. Are people so hateful of Bush that this kind of spin is even seen as worthwhile?
How do you suggest we help these sex slaves, carpet bomb their village? The west could wipe out ISIS in a week, faster if we used tactical nukes, the reason we don't do that is that we value the lives ISIS are so eager to sacrifice. Containing these arseholes to one patch of desert is the best we can do right now, they have bitten off way more than they can chew. We tried a ground army and it made things worse, we don't need to spill our own blood purging Saddam's generals from the desert, time is rapidly turning their own tribe against them.
In a historical sense ISIS may have actually done something useful, they concentrated the command and control of islamic extremists into one place and have united the Sunni's, Shiites, and Kurds in a fight against a common enemy. They are penned in on all sides by nations that are hostile towards them, they have no hope of expanding beyond Syria/Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) via military means. What happens after ISIS is gone I don't know, but the idea of a caliphate where they are not in charge is scaring the shit out of all of the tribal leaders right now and may just force the three tribes to find a more civilised way of disagreeing.
This war is a muslim war, if we charge in now boots and all it will revert to a muslim vs the west war which is precisely what ISIS wants, they want us to try and root them out because they believe that would line up the tribes behind them (better the devil you know and all that). The best thing the west can do now is work with Russia to avoid falling into the old cold war pattern of fighting proxy wars using impoverished nations as their pawns. If the west and Russia start openly fighting for influence in the region, we are in a different and much more deadly ball park.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Did you forget that Iraq was a U.S. ally at one point? That they used chemical weapons during their war with Iran? Oh, and that those two just so happened to occur during the same time periods?
India, Egypt, China? Might as well include Russia in your list too if you're just going to start listing out countries. And by the way, Egypt was a very close U.S. ally up until Spring fever got to them.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Anyone who defines chemical weapons as "WMDs" is doing it wrong. Very wrong.
There are two practical kinds of WMDs at this time: Biological weapons that introduce contagion(s), and nuclear weapons. In the future (probably not that far away), we can also look forward to kinetic energy weapons, IE big rocks coming down very fast from space onto a target area. Cheap, yields below, to, and above nuclear levels (almost arbitrarily above... these will be the primo WMD of the future -- want a hundred gigaton explosive yield? No problem, a KIW is your weapon of choice. Cost, fuel and time, nothing else), totally practical CEP (circular error probable... in other words, they can miss by more than they actually will miss, and they will still totally destroy the target. Even if the "target" was something the size of Texas. Or the asian continent.) And oh, yes, there will be side effects. That's the only thing that introduces practical limits to the yield of a KIW, in fact. If you want to live on the same planet afterwards, you're going to have to limit your ambitions to be known as "the big banger."
Chemical weapons can be defended against, rendered harmless via other chemicals, rendered ineffective via protective devices, and in any device I've ever heard of, are small-area denial weapons more than anything else. The most annoying thing about them is persistence, so a really wide dispersal weapon literally denies the area to anyone not properly suited up until the dispersal can be remediated. That's a very useful trick in warfare, by the way, though somewhat less effective these days what with various non-ground transport being so easily accomplished. Still, if you don't have to worry about ground troops, you can concentrate on the air. The most useful thing about chemical weapons is they inconvenience the heck out of the enemy you deploy them against; infrastructure becomes unusable, required operations in the affected area become enormously cumbersome, food supplies are rendered useless, agriculture is knocked back to the stone age... very much a "reduce enemy capacity to operate / make war" kind of weapon.
Calling Saddam's stuff WMDs is like calling an infantryman an army. (oh wait, we do that, don't we? "army of one" lol)
Sure, they can kill more than one person at once. But so can a conventional dumb bomb, a grenade, a machine gun (in fact, a machine gun, if you really think about it, has almost unlimited killing capacity, given that it is maintained correctly. If a machine gun kills a thousand, and a chemical weapon simply makes people wear funny suits, which one is the WMD? Have we inadvertently redefined "destruction" entirely here?)
And what about FABs like the MOAB? (typically fuel-air bombs, "Massive Ordnance Air Blast / mother of all bombs") You want wide-area destruction and death? Holy crap, they'll give you what you want. MOAB yield is 11 kilotons... the Hiroshima nuke was only ~16 kilotons. And the Russians, bless their competitive little hearts, have come up with a FAB with 44 kiloton yield.
Saddam's crap... those weren't exactly high end chemical weapons anyway. Mustard gas, etc.
Tempest in a teapot. And certainly NO reason to start a war with them. That was a complete bungle/lie/fuckup on the part of the Bush administration.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No. You don't get it. I hate ALL US military action, and those who order it, that isn't in a good cause. The good causes I am aware of include both world wars, possibly the actions (war? police? whatever...) in Bosnia, and Bush I's mini-war where he stomped Saddam's little invasion of Kuwait flat. That's about it, though I could perhaps be convinced if I've simply missed something we did right, which is entirely possible. There were many periods in my life where I was too disillusioned with politics to pay much attention at all. I'm still disillusioned, but I have a lot more free time now, so I'm paying pretty good attention at this point, at least compared to other decades in my life.
So here's how it actually works with me. I measure a president by what they did right, *and* what they did wrong. Working backwards:
Obama got his citiizens more access to healthcare. Mad kudos. Long time coming, and even though the congress turned a great single-payer idea into welfare for the middlemen (insurance companies), the bottom line is that many more people now have health care, pre-existing conditions no longer mean you're fucked from step one, kids are covered well into collage age, and the insurance companies are profit-limited by percentage, so it is much more difficult for them to make their money by scamming their customers out of benefits, and much easier to do it by adding policies. On the credit front, consumers have MUCH better conditions due to actions he gets credit for. On that front, they did a lot. Not perfect, but much better. He oversaw, and encouraged, much erosion of the institutionalized hate against gays that none of the presidents before him had the stones to address. He waited until term 2 for political reasons, and I guess I can stomach that, but he is now in the process of overseeing the beginning of the dismantling of the heinous war on personal choice represented by the drug war. He followed through and got us mostly out of Iraq... although I don't think that's going to hold. Afghanistan is still a stain on his presidency; although he didn't start it, he didn't end it, either, and it's a complete fuckpie of absolutely no use to anyone but bomb makers and their cronies. He's had to fight the most disreputable congress in my memory -- the republicans in particular, though I can't say I think much of the democrats either. They're all corrupt as hell, as usual, but they've done little positive and wasted an enormous amount of time on pointless votes about nothing that get nowhere, and that they KNOW will get nowhere. Idiots. But he's been playing chess while they've been playing angry checkers, and he's got my respect for that, too. He has outwitted congress every time by doing either the most correct, or nearly correct, thing in almost every case where they try to stymie him. Which is mostly. His record on constitutional rights is just as bad as Bush's, and I despise that part of his legacy. The PATRIOT act is no more than a long-unwashed shitstain on America's national underwear. Economically, he's got us back up past where Bush's abject mishandling of everything I can think of destroyed the economy, there are more people working today, finally, than just before the Bush-caused economic crash in 2008. Like Clinton, he's in the seat, his administration made it happen, he gets the lion's share of the credit.
Bush II did almost *everything* wrong, and he did his wrong really, really big. So he's right in the top class of my shitlist. I can't think of *anything* Bush II did correctly. If you can, by all means enlighten me, and I'll modify my opinion if that seems called for. I've already laid out most of what and how, so I'll spare ya.
Clinton oversaw the elimination of the federal deficit and also oversaw the strongest economy in recent memory. He was in the seat, and he should, and does, get the credit. He tried to get his citizens healthcare. He failed, but he tried. He went into the Balkans, and in my view, it was called for. Also, in my opinion definitely in his favor,
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.