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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."
According to the Times, the reports were embarrassing for the Pentagon because, in five of the six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been "designed in the US, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies".
Where were they found? Next to the plants set up by Western companies that filled them in Iraq, of course. Who has control of those plants now? Why, ISIS of course. Don't worry, though, the people who thought it was better we didn't know about these things are assuring us that all those weapons were hurriedly destroyed.
My work here is dung.
yes there were chemical weapons, we found them but it was apparently a huge secret even though that is why we went to war
That's the first thing out of my mouth when I heard this story on TV this morning. I can't imagine Bush and Darth Cheney not shouting it from the rooftops if it had been found as they say. Even if they had to cover up Western involvement, those CW shells would have been trotted out before a full court press so the Bush admin could have their "I told you so!" moment.
They were left over munitions from the Iraq v. Iran war of the 80's. It wasn't new munitions being made since Desert Storm '91. That too would have embarrassed the administration.
I heard frequently during the war itself that we HAD found chemical weapons, mostly from pro-war proponents. I gather that it was talked about all the time on Fox News and right-wing talk radio.
And the reply, even at the time, was that these were weapons from the first Gulf War, mostly inoperable or unreliable due to age, and likely forgotten about. They weren't part of an ongoing production effort, which is what we'd been told. There was widespread support for the war, at the beginning, based on that, which faded as we realized that the danger had been badly overstated.
So I'm trying to figure out what's new here. I had the impression that this was well known. Is it that it wasn't more widely, discussed because the Pentagon wanted it not to be?
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.
The chemical weapons were widely dispersed around Iraq by Saddam Husein's Regime. The cover story about there not being any was created to to try and prevent terrorist scouring all of the hidden weapons caches in Iraq for chemical weapons before the US troops had time to find and destroy them. Sadly, after the administration changed it was politically advantageous to perpetuate the cover story and discontinue chem weapons search efforts.
I don't want to do a sig now
Its no secret Iraq had chemical weapons. They used them liberally against Iranian human wave attacks during the Iran Iraq war.
The reason they were hushed up is because they were provided by western countries. You do know the U.S. and Europe backed Saddam in the Iran Iraq war and most probably encouraged the use of chemical weapons against Iranian teenagers right? Iran had a huge population advantage, Iraqi Shias weren't that keen on fighting Iranian Shia, so Iraq needed technology to level the field and the West helped with that edge.
The West was really happy about a lengthy, bloody stalemate in that war bleeding both countries white.
@de_machina
What, did you think that Hussein was playing his shell game with the inspectors because there really was NOTHING there??
I remember all that - how the inspectors were continuously kept from going to a certain place, then later, kept from going to some other place, until they all went home in frustration.
Hussein was a twisted bastard, but that sort of thing goes beyond his limited intellect, as far as just doing it to bother people.
It was so he could say "but nobody ever found everything".
BUSH WAS RIGHT!!!
No. Bush said that Saddam was actively making WMDs. Bush never said we needed to go to war in Iraq because there are chemical weapons leftover from the 80s. If this legitimizes the war in Iraq then we better get busy making bombs and soldiers. http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/cbwprolif
These are not the WMDs were were told were in Iraq. While Saddam's history with chemical weapons was well known at the time, they were NOT what people were concerned about. This stuff was not what was used as the excuse to go to war and invade.
They were not part of the sales pitch.
Also, these finds were well reported when they happened. They aren't a surprise. They're hardly news.
This sounds like a bad attempt at rewriting history. Someone is hoping that we all have short memories.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
These are weapons from the 80s. Weapons we helped Iraq to obtain when they were one of the people we were supporting in opposition to Iran.
They do not in any way vindicate Bush, and that is the reason that Bush covered it up.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The reason for war was WMDs like nuclear and biological weapons. The world already knew Iraq had chemical ones.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Really? Huffington post is your bible? Seriously?
What about all the scrap metal missile parts that went through the port of Rotterdam? Did Huffington post knock that story down too?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
Yeah who can forget "significunt (pun intended)quantities of Uranium from Africa" He was a puppet lying to all of us. The reason why we THOUGHT he had chemical weapons is we SOLD them to him to fight Iran. That was made clear enough. Most of them were destroyed and were used a "reason" to remove Sadam and open the Anbar oil fields ISIS now controls. See how wrong "we" can be? How much else can we mess up, uh West Africa?
Saddam based his entire foreign policy on having his enemies believe he had them. He had used them on both internal and external enemies in the past, it really should come as no surprise to anyone that they were there.
The only people I can see taking this as a great revelation are those that went around shouting "Bush Lied People Died", while they went around having tourettes fits if you mentioned anything good about the man. I doubt even they believed it, but just found it a convenient way to shut down reasoned argument. You could point out that President Clinton bombed Iraq first to stop the WMD program there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... and it would sail over their heads.
The most mind boggling thing is apparently both sides are singularly polarized on the current president who has been implementing the exact same policies as his predecessor. Albeit, a Republican president might have permanently stationed troops in Iraq and prevented ISIS.
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.
There was never any question about whether Iraq had chemical weapons. After all, Saddam used them against Iran and his own people. The question has always been, "where are they now?"
The possible answers are that he still had them somewhere, that he gave them away, that he destroyed them, or that he had run out. Each of these answers presents problems. If he still had them, then where were they and who might still have access to them? If he gave them away, who did he give them to and why? If he destroyed them, why not let the West verify this and stop the sanctions (and also prevent an invasion)? If he used them all up, why didn't he make more? Saddam's actions suggest that he had something to hide, or that he wanted people to think that he had something to hide (I always liked the idea that he wanted Iran to believe he had them, but wanted to plant doubt in the US, and he couldn't pull off that balancing act).
I don't know if I believe the article, but it would be nice to have a conclusive answer one way or another.
Back in 2004 or 2005, I recall some friends whose son was over in Iraq saying that their son had told them he had been with a team that discovered Iraqi chemical weapons and that he saw them with his own eyes. His parents insisted that it was just a matter of time before it hit the news in a big way.
And then nothing.
I don't know what to think at this point. I guess it's a sad state we're in, since I can honestly say that neither the notion that we used them as a pretext for war, nor the notion that we covered up their presence in order to save face for some other reason, strike me as being particularly fanciful.
This comes up about once a year. Iraq had chemical weapons and everyone knew about it BUT this was during the Iran/Iraq war. They were largely destroyed before the second gulf war. What we're cleaning up NOW is still remnants from way back then. What Bush said was that we had to go to war due to imminent threat of actual weapons being used. That was not the case at the time -- when Bush was justifying invasion -- nor is it the case now. We're finding debris and remnants that are hazardous, sure, but no longer weaponized. And they have not been weaponized since well before Bush referenced them as "weapons".
Here's a recent reference:
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/conservatives-continue-get-iraqi-wmd-story-wrong
And here's one from a nearly identical situation in 2011:
http://www.wired.com/2011/11/iraq-wmd-seal-target-geronimo/
And here's a fantastic timeline that CNN put together back in 2010:
http://cns.miis.edu/stories/100304_iraq_cw_legacy.htm
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.
"Aluminum tubes! Why else would they ever need to buy aluminum tubes?"
Really. They come free with Cuban cigars.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Umm. Yes he did. See 9/12/02 speech at the UN, and 2003 state of the union.
And the bush administration, though not bush himself, was pushing the (clearly bogus) nuclear line pretty hard. "Aluminum tubes! Why else would they ever need to buy aluminum tubes?"
Could these tubes be used for the internets traffic?
you're revising history. it was also for chemical weapons, and yes everybody knew they had them.
The summary also seems to have left off the critically important TIMELINE.
The "weapons" that were "found" were manufactured and abandoned in the FIRST Gulf War. Back when Bush SENIOR was the President of the USofA.
So the troops in the SECOND Gulf War (Bush Junior) were being exposed to hazardous chemicals that were 10+ years old. THAT is what is/was being covered up. Our troops were working in/around hazardous waste disposal sites WITHOUT proper equipment or training or supervision or follow-up.
There are not any "WMD" being "found" in Iraq now. It's hazardous WASTE.
ISIS (stupid name) does not have "chemical weapons" from that. They have chemical waste that is a health hazard. No GA, GB, GD, VX, or anything like that.
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.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
The problem is that chemical weapons are treated as if they were nuclear weapons in terms of diplomatic maneuverings and consequences... or at least were considered as such. In other words, if a country decides to openly use chemical weapons on American soldiers, it is considered "justified" to go ahead and use nuclear weapons in retaliation.
Yes, this is screwed up and seems silly, but it was the chemical weapons that the Bush administration was talking about elsenwhen, not the nuclear or biological weapons.
Iraq also had a nuclear bomb program in the 1980's, but that one got bombed out of existence by Israel when Iraq tried to build a breeder reactor. There certainly wasn't anybody who was serious about finding nuclear weapons in Iraq in the early 2000's decade. The question at hand was with regards to how large and widespread their chemical weapons inventory might be.
It was for NEW chemical weapons which was never found.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They are so used to lying that they now are incapable of telling the truth. Even when the truth is better than the lie.
The chemical as WMD goes far back to the origins of the Cold War. The rule was that launching chemical would be treated just like nuclear and responded to as such.
They aren't even weapons at this point. (You know, the "W" in "WMD")
They are toxic waste.
Saddam had ammo dumps everywhere. Saddam wasn't a big fan of maintenance and upkeep, so you are going to find a lot of old, dangerous junk in these places.
The NY Times article suggests that the Pentagon did not crow about these finds precisely because they were pre-1991 junk and not the WMDs that we were promised. The press would have laughed at them. As to keeping the number of injured servicemen secret, that is the default behavior of the Pentagon going back to Agent Orange in Viet Nam. I have heard rumors that the Pentagon is keeping the number of servicemen injured by depleted uranium secret, also.
I believe that the Pentagon actually thought that Saddam had an active chemical weapons program going on when we invaded Iraq. A modern army such as the U.S. army has little to fear from chemical weapons. What they didn't know was that Saddam had given up making chemical munitions when Clinton bombed all the chemical plants.
AC above is totally wrong. Saddam was cooperating fully with the inspectors when we attacked him. He was begging us to inspect whatever we wanted. There were UN inspectors on the ground when George W. Bush told them to get out because he wanted to start bombing.
The nuclear weapons were also never found as Iraq never had the capability.
Correction, it wasn't found because the program was destroyed during and after the first gulf war and by a unilateral bombing run from Israel earlier.
The claim by the Bush administration was that they were manufacturing more and newer chemical ones. This was never substantiated.
But that presumes the burden of proof was on Bush. Saddam was proven to have chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in the first gulf war. One of the most important conditions for allowing Saddam to remain in power and for the end of first gulf war short of his removal was the admittance and allowing of international inspectors to verify the termination of those programs. More than a decade later Saddam was still blocking inspectors. The fact was inspections had failed to confirm Saddam's compliance with ending his WMD programs. So much so that many of the inspectors, Like Scott Ritter objected to the war on the grounds that chemical weapons would be likely be deployed against allied forces. That of course didn't stop Ritter from being a cheer leader in chorus afterwards pointing out the failure to find WMDs...
No sane person is going to think an "old" WMD is just fine and a "new" WMD is not.
You do realize that not all weaponry lasts forever right? Even nuclear weapons are retired because the components may not be as effective as when they were put into service. Since the Iran-Iraq War, the world knew Iraq had mustard and sarin gas. This is not news.
Old or new, if the basis for the war was that Iraq had WMDs in its possession, this fits the bill.
Not when the actual claim by Colin Powell and the administration was that Iraq was MANUFACTURING new chemical weapons.
Let's look at one. 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. Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers.
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?
No, it's conservatives that are spinning these discoveries that Bush was right when in reality they are not. That's dishonest. That is spin.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As I understand it (in hindsight):
- Saddam was supposed to stop his production of new WMDs and estroy the old stuff.
- He apparently complied, at least with stopping new production. (His guys - maybe at his orders, maybe on their own - apparently hid some of the key components of the nuclear program so it could potentially be restarted at some later date without starting from zero.)
- But a lot of the old stuff was still around.
- Meanwhile, he had enemies all around, and one of the deterrents was that they thought he had all this nasty weaponry.
- So to keep them at bay, he made it look to his neighbors like he really was posturing about stopping and destroying, while still having much and making more. ("I got rid of all that stuff." Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) As a "good client dictator" he counted on the US diplomatic and intelligence communities to know that he really did it, was tellnig the truth to us, and putting on a show for his neighbors.
- Unfortunately for him, the show he put on for his neighbors convinced the US that he still had and was still making. Oops!
- Meanwhile, his neighbors planted stories, disguised as intelligence reports, about his continuation. (One such that hit the press was the forged documents for the "yellowcake" uranium ore purchase. The guy who fabricated it bragged about it after the war.)
- So the US decided he'd gone (too) rogue and had to be taken out.
- The US went in looking for the NEW stuff and the CURRENT production and research. Oops! Didn't find it. Found a bunch of old stuff, but that didn't support the argument for going to war. Either it didn't exist (and the US had done a BIG boo-boo) or it was just well enough hidden that it hadn't been found yet.
- So it was politically expedient for the administration to not mention the old stuff while they kept looking for the new stuff they still believed was there.
- It was also politically expedient for the opposition to crow about not finding the stuff that was the reason for the war. The old stuff weakened the message, so they didn't mention it.
- Most of the mainstream press was solidly in the opposition's pocket. So they didn't mention the old stuff, either. This made any reports of it from the remainder of the press look like a pro-administration fabrication.
Thus, if you weren't watching many sources and making really good estimates of what was correct, important, fluff, and/or fabrications, you either didn't hear about the old weaponry or thought such stories were disinformation, and came away with the idea that there wasn't any WMD material to be had in Iraq
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's a myth. It cost a lot, since you have to pay a civilian quite a bit to go into a hostile area to do engineering (and engineers made quite a premium in the area even in peacetime), but e.g. Haliburton earnings were unimpressive (I bought the stock, hoping the conspiracy theorists were on to something, but it seems they were merely on something).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This is old news. There are forgotten caches of weapons from the Iran-Iraq War (mostly produced by the U.S.) that were left to rot out in the desert, as well as munitions that Saddam had laying around in case the Kurds got out of hand.
Anyone that ever said he didn't have *any* WMDs *ever* would simply be ignorant of the well-known facts. What was clearly a bald-faced lie was that he was currently producing nerve gas and nukes in preparation for invading his neighboring countries. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Show me the nukes and I will personally apologize to George Bush. Until then, no, this ain't that.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
It was common knowledge that Saddam had chemical weapons as far back as the 80's. Bush and co were pushing a bogus "mushroom" line and worse still they knew they were doing it (although I think Powell may have been set up as a fall guy), that slide show at the UN made a lot of people (including me) angry, but to be fair Saddam was pretending he had them so maybe they did believe it, who's to say what a politician actually believes? - What Bush and co actually believed at the time we will never really know, but we are left with two unflattering explanations, either they were incompetent ideologues or despicable warmongers.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Sure - they could be used in the implementation of RFC 1149.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I swear you're the only other person who gets that. Saddam wanted the same deal that North Korea got.
Clinton bought off NK when they were pursuing WMD, with a nuclear reactor, food and gas. I want to say that Saddam's biggest mistake was that it was Bush, and not Clinton, he was dealing with, but is largely irrelevant. We could not invade NK and depose the government, whereas in Iraq, we had that option. Clinton had no choice but to make a deal. (I'm not saying he would have invaded anybody in any case) Saddam hadn't looked at the map lately, and perhaps he really thought that one of the reasons that Bush Sr. stopped had anything to do with him or his army.
Yes, there was a difference between the two men. Bush Jr. is somewhat of a Texan; once you've lied to him, you're probably not going to be able to make a deal. Clinton takes nothing personally in politics, especially lying, and whenever you're ready to come to the table, he'll deal. And he's likely to get the better end of it, because he's damn good at it.
But Saddam was playing games with Bush, and Bush basically fell for it, so maybe that tempers the ideologue part of the label. Yes, he doctored the 'evidence' to get us to sign off on the war, but in his heart; he knew he was going to find out what Saddam was up to, and it was something. The simple warmonger option makes no sense to me. Why? He got nothing out of it, and a whole lot of grief to boot. He can't do the speaking circuit and fundraisers like an ex-prez is supposed to. He's trapped painting in his compound. Cheney? He was already rich as shit. Blackwater? Please.
There is just no way they wanted this kind of fallout from not finding WMDs, and thus, invading Iraq for no reason. So, of your two options, only the incompetent option is logically possible. It feels a bit weak, I admit, but the warmonger makes no sense at all. Also, there is actually a third option, a theory if you will... wayyy out there, that most perfectly fits everything that has happened so far. But it's just too crazy to post on /.
> MOAB yield is 11 kilotons.
Lol. It's okay, I made a ridiculous error in a post I made here a couple of weeks ago.
Besides the obvious fact that implies one bomb would take out a major city, I guess it didn't occur to you that you were claiming the MOAB weighs MILLIONS of pounds? Sure, you might guess that current HE is twice as powerful as tnt, but that's still eleven million pounds just for the explosive composition and the metal casing is going to weigh more than that. You're going to need an awfully big plane to carry a 22 million pound bomb.
Found it. This is what I read first, but days ago, that probably sent me off on my trail of errors:
"In September 2007 Russia exploded the largest thermobaric weapon ever made. The weapon's yield was reportedly greater than that of the smallest dial-a-yield nuclear weapons at their lowest settings.[41][42] Russia named this particular ordnance the "Father of All Bombs" in response to the United States developed "Massive Ordnance Air Blast" (MOAB) bomb whose backronym is the "Mother of All Bombs", and which previously held the accolade of the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in history.[43] The bomb contains an about 7 tons charge of a liquid fuel such as ethylene oxide, mixed with an energetic nanoparticle such as aluminium, surrounding a high explosive burster[44] that when detonated created an explosion equivalent to 44 metric tons of TNT."
Blah. Details. Why are they so hard?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.