Quote:
Originally posted by Not Me
So are you saying that there were never WMDs in Iraq? If so, how did all those Kurds die? And if there were WMDs in Iraq, where are they now? Do you honestly believe that SH destroyed them and left no records of that?
There are fucking records detailing the fraud occurring in the oil for food program. Why wouldn't there be any records of destroying the WMDs?
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I don't think anyone now thinks that Iraq had nuclear or biological weapons, though I could be wrong about the latter. So we are really talking about chemical weapons.
Chemical weapons are expensive and of limited military usefulness. E.g.:
- Just as it is easy to underestimate the importance of conventional explosives, it is easy to exaggerate the lethality of most chemical weapons. Many forms of lower level attacks using chemical weapons might do no more or less damage than attacks using conventional weapons. . . . Large high explosive weapons can easily be equal to both chemical and radiological weapons as “weapons of mass destruction.”
It is also an illusion that the effects of chemical weapons are always radically worse or more repellant than the damage done conventional weapons. No one who has actually visited a battlefield and seen anyone with a fragmentation wound in the stomach and then seen a prisoner affected by a moderate dose of mustard gas is going to accept for a second that one casualty is somehow worse than another.
Link. This report was written before 9/11, which certainly proved the point.
For these reasons, one can understand why Iraq -- under the pressure of sanctions -- might decide to give up its chemical arsenel. In addition, chemical weapons deteriorate, and are expensive to maintain. Also, we know that weapons were destroyed after the first Gulf War under UN auspices. It also does not surprise that records are incomplete. Max Weber did not have modern Iraq in mind when as an example of bureaucracy's ideal type, and not just because he died too soon.
