Blue Crab Boulevard

Over And Under

A House Armed Services Committee hearing this week about the 500 or so chemical munitions found in Iraq so far appears to have been an exercise in futility.

Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) contended that an April report by the U.S. Army's National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) is clear evidence of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

"Some may want to play down the significance of this report or even deny that WMD have been found in Iraq," Hunter said at Thursday's hearing, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.

Citing the United Nations resolutions that called for destruction of all of Hussein's banned weapons, Hunter added that "the verified existence of such chemical weapons" proves they were not destroyed and "in part because of such violations, we voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq."

But Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.), the senior Democrat on the committee, countered that the NGIC report did not address Baghdad's prewar chemical weapons program. Rather, he said, it was "written to address the force protection concerns of our service members in Iraq."

"Yes, these certainly are munitions," Skelton added, "but they are not the evidence of prewar assertions made by the administration."

The classified overview of chemical munitions says that U.S. forces have found about 500 shells, canisters or other munitions containing the chemical weapons. Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the committee the shells were produced in the 1980s for the Iran-Iraq war but were not used.

Last week, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a strong supporter of the war, touted the findings, provoking protests from some Democrats.

Fact: Chemical munitions were found. Fact: They appear to date from prior to the first Gulf War. Fact: UN Ceasefire required destruction of all chemical munitions. Fact: The munitions are degraded, but many are still potentially lethal.

Spinning this one way or the other is really quite meaningless in light of the facts. And if the Democrats have long been accusing the White House of overstating the case for WMDs then this indicates just as much spin in the opposite direction.:

Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect."

The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about."

Testimony given in front of Congressman Larsen indicated that the weapons were potentially lethal. To spin that in such a way as to make light of that fact is absolutely no better than what he is accusing the White House of. Is overstating or understating any different qualitatively?

Politics, War | Gaius July 1, 2006

By TC@LeatherPenguin, July 1, 2006 @ 9:33 am

This whole “they are degraded, so they didn’t pose a threat” meme drives me crazy. Here and there you hear about some farmer in FroggieLand (or somewhere else on the Continent) finding a WWI mustard shell in his fields, and authorities point to the shell’s toxicity as the reason his crops, cattle, or the farmer himself are being poisoned because of that “degraded” antique.
By Gaius, July 1, 2006 @ 9:35 am

Yeah, I know. I’d be willing to bet the ones saying “degraded” wouldn’t be willing to actually touch one of the things.
By Ken Hoop, July 1, 2006 @ 12:48 pm

again, the necons grasping at straws: these are nor WMDs even were they found in mint condition
By Gaius, July 1, 2006 @ 12:59 pm

The are chemical munitions, they are lumped into the shorthand term WMD, they are still lethal – read the article.
By Black Jack, July 1, 2006 @ 1:24 pm

Ken, tell that to the 100’s of dead Kurds and 1000’s of dead Iranians who have some first hand experience with Saddam’s chemical weapons. Or, you could check with Chemical Ali, he can give you a perspective from the other side.

The munitions in question are certainly “weapons,” they can and have killed large “masses” of people, and that pretty clearly makes them rather indisputably “destructive.”

So, is there some part of WMD don’t you understand? Or, can’t you handle the truth?
By Y-Love, July 2, 2006 @ 7:05 pm

While I am all for jumping down the throats of neocon straw graspers, as was stated earlier, there are facts here. However, as was stated on FOX News, the US knew that there were chemical weapons in Iraq prior to the Gulf War and during (as did everyone, they used them). And we know about massacres within Iraq using them. Now we find a stash of weapons from before the Gulf War.

These would have been used in 1990. What new information — or credibility — does this give us now? What, because we found an underground dumpster?
By Gaius, July 2, 2006 @ 7:34 pm

The US had ample, completely valid reasons for going to war. WMDs were never the justification. The left has been trying to reframe it that way for quite some time.

Violation of a ceasefire is, and always has been, legitimate reason to resume hostilities. If launching missiles at allied aircraft wasn’t already sufficient justification, the failure to destroy these chemical munitions, the failure to comply with the ceasefire requirements of the UN resolution simply make the justification for war airtight.

Clear enough?