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What Part of “Degraded” Do They Not Understand?

Just when I might have been starting to feel sorry that he was going to get humiliated in this fall’s election (he is the closest thing to a traditional conservative on social issues in the Senate), Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) reminds me why I will not be sorry to see him go. In the latest […]

Just when I might have been starting to feel sorry that he was going to get humiliated in this fall’s election (he is the closest thing to a traditional conservative on social issues in the Senate), Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) reminds me why I will not be sorry to see him go. In the latest chapter of the GOP’s inexplicable kamikaze election year strategy of closely identifying themselves with the President’s most generally unpopular policy (no doubt because it is “the right thing to do,” eh?), Sen. Santorum announced that 500 degraded mustard and sarin nerve gas shells had been found in Iraq since the invasion. This is apparently supposed to be the justification the jingoes have been seeking for three years. If I were a true believer in this war, I think I might be a bit underwhelmed. 500 degraded shells? That’s all? I would guarantee right now that there must be several countries, hostile and allied, that possess a significantly greater quantity of chemical weapons than this. Scott Richert, Clark Stooksbury and Matt Barganier at Antiwar’s blog have more comment, all of which shows pretty clearly that this “revelation” is not very meaningful and that the War Party is getting pathetically desperate in this latest bid to revive the WMD aspect of their argument.

I’m not a chemical weapons expert, nor am I someone with military experience, but if these shells are degraded chemical weapons this would probably mean two things: they are relatively much less dangerous than they are intended to be, which makes them even less than the small threat they would otherwise be, and they have been sitting around, unused, for a substantial period of time. As Scott notes, the evidence would point to a pre-1991 date for these weapons, which would reconfirm (for the nth time) that Iraq’s weapons programs were debilitated and controlled by the inspections and sanctions regime. As Dr. Fleming has noted before, when the administration said that they knew that WMDs existed in Iraq, they were lying when they said they knew something they very plainly did not and, as it turns out, could not have known (because, for starters, there were no weapons or facilities to know about).

The Iraqis’ failure to maintain even a small cache of fully lethal chemical weapon shells must point up the stunning weakness of their chemical weapons program in the intervening years since 1991; it would suggest that so few resources were dedicated to the manufacture and maintenance of such weapons that the Iraqis did not even have a reasonably large supply of chemical weapons to be used in basic artillery, which I suspect must be one of the easier ways to deploy such weapons, to say nothing of more elaborate distribution systems or delivery vehicles. Does Mr. Santorum really want to base his support for the war on such flimsy, nay, irrelevant evidence? Apparently he does. But that would be no different from what war supporters have done from the beginning.

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