Another revelation by the NYTimes as it relates to the question of Iraq WMDs (Via Powerline):
Until now, I have been willing to go along with the conventional wisdom that Iraq did not possess significant stockpiles of WMDs prior to the 2003 war. Leftover chemical munitions were discovered here and there during and after the invasion, but it was plausible to think that they were odds and ends, not part of a usable stockpile subject to the regime’s control.
Today, however, the New York Times dropped a bombshell: in the aftermath of the Iraq war, the CIA purchased from an unidentified intermediary no fewer than 400 Borak warheads filled with sarin, a deadly nerve gas:
The analysis of sarin samples from 2005 found that the purity level reached 13 percent — higher than expected given the relatively low quality and instability of Iraq’s sarin production in the 1980s, officials said. Samples from Boraks recovered in 2004 had contained concentrations no higher than 4 percent.
The new data became grounds for concern. “Borak rockets will be more hazardous than previously assessed,” one internal report noted. It added a warning: the use of a Borak in an improvised bomb “could effectively disperse the sarin nerve agent.”
An internal record from 2006 referred to “agent purity of up to 25 percent for recovered unitary sarin weapons.”
~~~ Some have tried to disparage the importance of munitions like the Borak warheads on the ground that they are “old” WMDs, manufactured before 1991. But this is wrong. One of the chief concerns about Iraq’s WMDs always was whether it had actually destroyed its vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons, as it claimed. One of the principal tasks of the UNMOVIC inspections that were carried out until 2002 was to try to verify that these “old,” but still lethal, weapons had actually been destroyed.
~~~ In my opinion, the revelation that more than 400 Borak rocket warheads armed with sarin were still extant after the 2003 war is of a different quality than prior reports of old stocks that were encountered here and there by American troops. These rockets were not, it appears, dispersed randomly in dumps and forgotten storage depots. One individual was able to produce more than 400 of them, suggesting that they most likely were stored and inventoried by the Baathist regime. If that is the case, the conventional belief that the world’s intelligence agencies were wrong, and Iraq did not possess significant stockpiles of WMDs prior to the 2003 war, is incorrect. One shudders to think what a terrorist group could accomplish with 400 sarin-equipped rockets.
More shudder at the thought that the lies about the lies were lies all along.
Uh huh. Why does the photograph of the “usable” stockpile show a heap of rusting metal parts, with suited-up UN technicians at work sealing leaks? They were only “usable” in the sense that they weren’t so degraded they were no longer dangerous.
What this story represents is more details about something that’s been known all along: A random assortment of chemical weapons left over from the Iraq/Iran war were still scattered around Iraq over 20 years later. Every time a new detail about that comes out, it’s heralded as vindication of the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein had a Weapons of Mass Destruction capability that threatened the United States to a degree justifying a full-scale military invasion.
He didn’t. In fact, the only thing that put U.S. and coalition troops in range of an attack with a weapon improvised from deteriorating Iraqi chemical ordnance was the invasion and occupation of Iraq itself.
The 5,000 other WMD that were discovered constitutes stockpiles as well. The left will keep changing their version of what they claimed to be true at the time, that is Iraq had NO WMD, because they simply don’t have the integrity or honor to admit that they were wrong. Arrogance is bliss. Perhaps if some of these know-it-alls were rounded up and exposed to the contents of one of these sarin equipped rockets they would change their tune but then again most of them probably wouldn’t be around to do so afterwards. That is of course if they had the stones to take the challenge in the first place. As I noted on another thread in reference to the continuing revelations that Iraq DID possess WMD, I know of one case whereby two American servicemen died from exposure to the contents of one of the 155 WMD rounds that were discovered. But hey, it was “old” and therefore no threat.
There hasn’t been much change in the left’s reaction to old military junk that has turned up. The right’s tale, however, has come a long way from what we were warned about to begin with.
I don’t think many people would have been ready to go to war if he’d raised the specter of random heaps of rusty and degraded chemical ordnance left over from a war that had ended over 2 decades earlier. I wish people would quit trying to pretend that the threat we were warned about has turned out to have been real.
@Greg: How did you envision WMD’s being used against the United States, Greg? Iraq’s fleet of long-range bombers carpet bombing NYC? Their super-long range artillery shelling California or Denver?
As it relates to possible terror attacks against US cities, those weapons are just as functional and useful to the terrorists in their current condition as in the condition when they were new.
Weak and silly.
@Greg: Ontario Hydro bought 600 tons of yellow cake which is being processed for fission fuel for nuclear reactors. This , of course, does not count in the tabulation of WMD’s.
@Bill:
Which is why it is useless responding to the comments anymore.
@Bill, #5:
I really don’t know. Maybe you can explain just how that mushroom cloud Bush referred to was expected to come about.
From President Bush’s Cincinnati speech in 2002:
@Greg:
Intel Reports: Saddam Could Have Had Nukes By 2007
@Greg:
Before I answer this soft-ball question easily and briefly, let me preface it with this explanation of factors you are obviously and embarrassingly unaware.
People that come to such sites as Flopping Aces are not your run-of-the-mill keyboard warrior that goes on MSNBC’s Facebook page and says stuff like “Yeah, but Bush lied and people died” or “The recession was caused by Bush’s economic policies”. In fact, the people that come here do so (mostly) because they have more curiosity, information and knowledge than the average bear out there. I am not claiming that I am the most well-informed or intelligent that posts here (Lord, no) but I am in league and, in the outside world (on the Dallas Morning News opinion pages, where I frequent, for instance), where the stupid and willfully ignorant go forth and issue their stock off-the-shelf opinions, courtesy of Kos, Media Matters, Huffington, DNC, MSNBC, etc, I AM a giant among mental midgets.
That being said, have you never heard of suitcase bombs? Have you never heard of dirty bombs? Your straw-man argument of a proposed fear of some straw-intercontinental-army is, well, weak and silly. No one feared Iraq using any of these capabilities to attack the US in a conventional matter. Had you paid a bit of attention, you would remember that the concern was Iraq providing these capabilities to terrorists to make terror attacks on US soil. The unsecured way in which storage containers are shipped and received at US ports was a MAJOR concern.
While, at the time, the goals and objectives of the war in Iraq were clear and concise, you on the left routinely distorted it to being somehow related to a belief that Hussein was involved in the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks or that Iraq somehow was threatening to attack the United States with its WMD’s. Understand that this fools NO ONE. Kind of like wearing a bad toupee among family and friends that have seen you bald for decades; epic fail.
If you are trying to convince me that you are stupid, you are succeeding.
I suppose the data will never come out. Truckloads of WMD went across the border to Syria, as documented by our spy satellites. I don’t know where it all went, but there was a thundering lot of it.
What was left in Iraq was only a small part of what Saddam owned.
Remember: he wanted to take over as the supreme ruler of Islam.
That was why the war with Iran; he wanted control of the Muslim holy sites in Iran.
And then there was Joe Wilson.
What a terrible conflagration of lies and deceits!
@mathman:
The fact that Iraq had such large quantities of the older WMD’s when they weren’t supposed to have any, lends credibility to that argument.
@Wordsmith: How many times have you posted this? How many times did Mata and Aye post it? Yet it still doesn’t sink in. I have often been complimented on my patience with people. Yours far exceeds mine.
@Greg: Greggie, did Bush lie??
Leftists are delusionally choosing never to see the world as it is, but insist everyone accept their insane misperception of reality. They are ‘The Man of La Mancha’ on a double LSD/PCP overdose. They cannot accept the truth that Iraq had WMDs anymore than they could accept that islam demands the subjugation or slaughter of all non-muslims – even though it is repeatedly written in the koran. They cannot accept that there is no way to continually overspend your annual income and ever hope to get out of debt. They cannot accept that some people are more successful than others because they worked harder. They cannot accept that there is any possibility that the ideology of leftism could be wrong – in fact they regularly insist the only reasons leftists ever lose elections are because:
A) Voters are too stupid to know what is good for them, or
B) The left didn’t do a good job getting their message out.
I do not envy those who will live through the chaos hurtling towards us.