Well, they found something…

by

AP and Reuters are both reporting the discovery of mortar shells that may – repeat, may – contain blister gas. They’re being tested now to determine whether or not that they are, in point of fact, chemical weapons; the shells appear to have been buried for at least a decade, and are probably left over from the Iran-Iraq War.

End result? Nothing much in regards to the debate. I predict a good deal of tap-dancing around the awkward fact that UNSC 687 ordered that materials like these (should they be war gasses, of course) were to be destroyed, which means that the cease-fire was stillborn from the get-go. I further predict lots of tedious verbiage about the number/age of said alleged gasses (steadfastly ignoring the fact that Hussein was not allowed a thimbleful), why chemical weapons shouldn’t be mixed in with bio or nukes anyway (an interesting but irrelevant argument when defining diplomatic terms) and at least one allegation that these materials were planted somehow (rolling eyes). Of course, I expect that all this will happen on other sites, as here we have intelligent, thoughtful readers from across the spectrum who will certainly be able to come up with intelligent, thoughtful variations of the first three arguments.

Should it prove necessary, of course. The tests are still out.

Moe

UPDATE: My talented coblogger Katherine was able to find a working link to 687. This makes her look good and me look bad, which is only fitting. Some pretty good stuff coming out of the comments section, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Katherine’s showing me up again (making it look effortless, too) with a link to Marshall that reader Harley referenced. I like ‘rhetorical hooligans’ myself.

18 thoughts on “Well, they found <em>something</em>…”

  1. if they’re left over from the first Gulf War, would Saddam have even known where they were?
    It’s hard to tell from the article whether they were just buried under the sand and long forgotten and left to rot, or in some kind of cache. (Also, I can’t help thinking of that scene in Fargo with the buried money and the ice scraper.)

  2. You missed out two bits, so far as I can see:
    1. The bit about whether any weapons would/would not have been sold/sellable/accessible to al-Qaida. Seem to recall a big thing being made out of that at the time.
    2. The bit about whether he was a threat to us or likely to be one in the near future.
    Other points are fair ones.

  3. Also this:
    “the cease-fire was stillborn from the get-go”–is a bizarre argument. First, this is hardly the most damning thing we have on Saddam from the first ceasefire to the present day.
    Second, if these were the only chemical weapons ever found after the Gulf War, it could plausibly be a good faith oversight. I don’t know much about international law, but if ceasefires and treaty law bears any resemblance to U.S. contract law, it’s not an on-off switch between “you are in letter perfect compliance with every aspect of our ceasefire agreement” and “you have breached our agreement and we may invade you whenever we please.”

  4. You haven’t included the most important problem.
    There was no yellow cake involved, and no prospect of mortar shells being delivered to New Jersey via model airplane drone. If Bush touts this as the WMD he was looking for, it will be worse than not finding anything at all. The more this pissant WWI stuff turns out to be the justification for war, the more contrast is drawn between this and the mushroom cloud ghost stories the administration told us.
    Furthermore, I don’t know if we made it as far as north as this, but could they be OURS leftover from the first Gulf War? I’m not talking about planting them, I’m talking about abandoning or even forgetting a supply cache. Given the small number of them it also seems quite plausible that they were genuinely lost to the Iraqis.
    Finally, I guess you’re right to roll your eyes at the planting argument- if this is all they’ve got, it would be hard to understand the motivation.

  7. Marshall weighs in:
    “Needless to say, if confirmed this wouldn’t change at all the question of ‘whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction’ since they seem to have been buried in a war zone in which it’s well-known these weapons were used, and buried there in some small quantity at the time. Equally so, this wouldn’t prevent yahoos from insisting on some sort of vindication. But there’s not much you can do about yahoos or rhetorical hooligans but keep your own head on straight and let them chatter.”
    Please not I am not conferring yahoo or hooligan status upon anyone. Tho’ I sorta like ‘rhetorical hooligans.’

  11. OT, but did Hesiod’s visit make Tacitus explode? Haven’t been able to get to the site for a few minutes. Unless of course Tac has built a Harley-proof firewall. 🙂

  13. Let’s assume the shells do contain mustard gas or some other blister agent. This is the level of WMD that I expected Iraq to have – small caches of battlefield munitions dating back to the war with Iran. I’ve actually been kind of worried that we haven’t found anything up until now – finding nothing is more of a signal of guilty intent than finding trivial stuff like this.

  14. How could these count as WMD?
    These are no longer viable shells and could not have been used as “weapons”. Ammo caches that have been rendered useless due to elemental exposure are not the type of WMD that Powell and Bush were talking about in any speech that I heard/read.
    Unless they pull out some working WMD out of this pile, this cache will have to be declared “XWMD w/ mustard”.

  15. “How could these count as WMD?”
    Well, first off AFAIK they haven’t yet been determined to be chemical weapons. Still being tested, and all that.
    Second, there’s no statute of limitations on UNSC resolutions. If Hussein violated the cease-fire agreement back in 1991 by burying these things, then he violated it. The fact that the stuff that he buried decayed since then is merely a bonus; it would not have relieved Hussein of any of his responsibilities.

  16. “the cease-fire was stillborn from the get-go”–is a bizarre argument. First, this is hardly the most damning thing we have on Saddam from the first ceasefire to the present day.”
    I don’t think it is a bizarre argument. If the stuff is old it proves that from the very first moment of the cease fire all the way to the present, Saddam wasn’t living up to his requirements.

  17. Sebastian, Scott Ritter (whose track record commenting on Iraq has so far been better than any other pundit) said that yes, about 5% of Iraq’s recorded WMD from 1991 appeared to be missing – but that it was very likely that this was because they’d been lost track of, the paperwork was wrong, etc. If proved that these warheads were deliberately buried to conceal them from inspectors, there’s a case to answer: however, they still do not in themselves constitute any kind of threat to the US. The invasion of Iraq remains illegal.

Comments are closed.