[Talk] White lies and red lies

[Nick Simicich]

First off, I have to admit that this shell was news to me. I have been
preoccupied and not watching as much news as I might recently. 

However, I do not agree that finding one shell that might date from the
Iran Iraq war constitutes finding a large scale active program of WMD.
It proves that Iraq was likely technically in violation of their treaty.
So? The other violations of the treaty were worse than the single shell.

On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 16:08, Danny Rathjens wrote:
> synthetoonz@bellsouth.net wrote:
> > An Iraqi manufactured chemical weapon appeared in a terrorist bombing
> > weeks ago.  It was an artillery shell containing binary agents to
> > create Sarin (a nerve agent)
> "The coalition must still determine if the shell's discovery indicates
> Saddam possessed chemical weapons before the U.S. invasion last year."
> 
> Personally, I don't think one shell with stuff that we literally have
> tons of is a reason to kill people.
> 
> Wikipedia has some interesting info about it.

The wikipedia article seems to be wrong in at least one particular - in
some cases, carrier based Naval aircraft seem to have nukes.

> This would seem quite illogical, especially in the case of Sarin. 
> Iraq never produced high purity Sarin. Early in the Iran-Iraq war, 
> Iraq's production process produced low purity Sarin (60%), which 
> lost effectiveness relatively quickly, so that they could produce
> it in bulk and without more complex refining equipment. Even 
> refrigerated, it would drop to 10% purity in only 2 years, and 
> without refrigeration it would take weeks to months to reach this 
> level. Early during the Iran-Iraq war, it was critical that the
> Iraqis move their chemical weapons from the production lines to 
> the front in short order. In response to these inefficiencies, 
> Iraq developed binary weapons, in which the Sarin is developed 
> right before use. However, to use a binary weapon, methylphosphonic 
> difluoride had to be added to the shell immediately before use by a 
> soldier wearing a gas mask, where it would be mixed with cyclohexanol. 
> The reportedly simple IED found on the 15th would have little ability to do
>  such an action; it would require separate tanks and a pumping/mixing 
> system to produce any Sarin in this manner. The use of high explosives 
> in the IED, however, would destroy most of the Sarin if this were the design.
> 
> Based on the limited information that has been released to the public so 
> far, some observers have suggested that the shell might have been an 
> American-made M687, possibly provided to Iraq during the late 1980s.

I found the above quote on a couple of web sites. Yeah, it all sounds
weird.  It could be a one-off, it could be someone recreating something
they thought they learned in the Iran-Iraq war.

First off, I don't think that a single shell proves anything much other
than Saddam was a liar when he said that he destroyed everything and
that the inspections didn't find everything. No one is arguing with that
- UNSCOM's guess was that they got 90-95% of the WMD.  This was a 5%er,
I guess. The claim was that there were 15000 of these shells unaccounted
for by the Iraqis (in one inventory, vanished from the next one sort of
thing - claimed that they were destroyed when the discrepancy was
discovered, but there was no actual evidence to show that). 

So, the Iraqis supposedly claimed that they destroyed them, but assuming
that they were trying to destroy them and they got 98% of them, that
still leaves 300.  Seems like a large number for this kind of armament,
but it is just a guess - and likely as good an estimate as the estimates
of the disarmament commission - for all we know, this one was the sole
survivor, destined for an arms museum that was to commemorate the heroic
genocide of the kurds and it was diverted in an attempt to create
controversy. 

Is this shell the "smoking gun?" No, we need more than one shell to
prove a "false report of destruction" conspiracy by Saddam - we need a
stockpile of them. Some field pieces stocked with them. A resupply
vehicle full of them. A bunker under the sand with no apparent entrance
that is filled with them. A convoy of them being stored in Syria - any
of those will do. None of which have been found, but any of which could
have existed based on the reports of the inspectors and the fact that
they were barred from the time Clinton attacked until shortly after it
was too late for them to do any good.

When war has rolled over a country, things happen to it - suddenly,
munitions are easy to find because armies under attack just dump them.

This could have been preloaded under battlefield conditions and then not
fired, in which case my guess is that policy would have been to dump it
- maybe recover it later, maybe not. It could have been found and
reloaded with chemicals just before the attack.  

There are any number of ways that a single shell could end up used in
this ambush.

According to http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m687.htm, M687's
produce GB nerve agent, not Sarin.  Of course, that may simply be a
matter of the right precursors, which might mean that if Iraq had the
right precursors for sarin they put it in whatever they had. Iraq had a
lot of soldiers, some of them have probably picked a faction. Someone
probably had the job of mixing chemicals, and still remembered how to do
it.

Hey, I know, how about some conspiracy theories. Pick one or make your
own up.

1. An Iraqi fighter finds some old munition. It is a binary gas shell.
He knows how to use it and where the precursors are stored. It is loaded
with mix and explodes, but the sarin production depends on the whole
"mix in flight" concept of the firing providing mechanical stirring the
binary chemicals violently, he does not understand that, and that ain't
happening in a booby trap, so yields are down.

2.  Some foreign government agency, specifically the Mossad, builds
something that looks like an Iraqi shell. They plant it and purposely do
a bad job, they do not want to kill American soldiers. They are
interested in continuing to vilify Iraq.

3. Same as in 2, but substitute the CIA.

4. Same as in 2. but substitute mercenaries who are employees of a
civilian contractor from Iraq, who also want to vilify Iraq so as to
help justify the war. They may have even found an unexpended binary
Iraqi shell on the battlefield. Maybe hiring these mercenaries is why
Halliburton has lost money for the last couple quarters.

5. Saddam actually had deployed those to use against American troops in
the defense of Baghdad. This one was loaded, but then the troops in
charge of the artillery piece shot their officer and escaped, first
hiding the chemical shells so that they could not be accused of war
crimes, and then stripping their uniforms as they ran. One of them was
actually an Islamic extremist who was not willing to fight for a secular
regime, and he is now with an Islamist milita trying to make sure that
his sect controls the shape of the new government. He knew where their
chemical shell stash was buried and he has dug it up. They were out of
replacement chemicals so they used this one that had almost no Sarin
left in it after a year in the weather.


Now, is that paranoid enough for you?  My personal guess is 1. Someone
was known to have this job in the old administration and has found a new
employer. 

But the real answer is that I do not have the information to decide
between these possibilities.

Yes, a single shell does not do much, other than discredit the already
discredited pre-war Iraqi government regarding their claims of disposal.
Statements made at the time were that Iraq just was not cooperating.

Actually, it does one thing: It discredits the inspection process.  the
concept that an arms length inspection that was not getting full
cooperation from the government and instant access to everything that
they wanted to look at could ever find these illegal weapons strains
credibility. 

Repeatedly, Saddam said he had destroyed all his old stuff. Repeatedly,
the west said that they didn't believe him. As he spread the money
around, the chorus got weaker.  

Finally, the story came out, and was briefly reported and then it died.
If you search, you can find various conspiracy theories about why the
story died so fast. The most common one is that it is an old US munition
and it was legitimately sold to Iraq, and that Fox killed the story to
stop it from embarrassing the US.

No one gets the obvious answer: The story is told, and there just ain't
no more. Until we get attacked with more of the weapons, or find more,
well, all the details are told, there just are no more, so there is no
more story. No story, no spin that is pro or con the Iraq war, why dwell
on it?

Remember the sort of stuff that was being circulated during the run-up
to the war:
http://www.insightmag.com/news/2001/12/24/DailyInsight/Iraq-Closer.To.Chemical.Weapons.With.Un.Help-156453.shtml

http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=284402 is an
interesting article - ignore what Timmerman surmises and look at the
quotes. Essentially, what people are saying is, "We don't know what is
happening in Iraq, and essentially the inspection process can't work
because Iraq is not cooperating with it.

The reason we pulled the inspectors out while Clinton was in office was
because Saddam stopped them from doing any good. The reason Clinton
attacked Iraq with missiles after the inspectors left was that, even
with inspectors in the country, they thought that there were targets
involved in the WMD programs to attack. And our intelligence got no
better.

Saddam was upset at the inspectors because he thought that they were not
only there to inspect, but also to spy. The answer to that was, "Of
course, and that is how you keep your regime - make sure that the west
has enough intelligence on you that they can trust that they have a
comfort level.

And he managed to make sure we had no intel. Eventually, that, plus his
actions as a terror supporting rogue state, drove us to attack him.

I like to think that, despite the silly election year rhetoric, any
president would have attacked Iraq under similar circumstances.

The ONLY way that inspections could ever have worked was if Saddam, from
day 1, essentially said, "Give them everything that they want. We are
essentially off a war footing. Make sure we are open and transparent
with everything. We have no secrets at all, we are beaten."

Then the inspectors get 100% willing cooperation, from day 1, and they
are able to develop an atmosphere of trust. Instead, there was this big
deal about hiding secret programs that the first inspectors found some
of with a "follow the money" sort of inspection. The point is that once
you realize that Saddam's policy is, "in so far as is possible, fool the
inspectors", how can you (1) ever believe that inspections will be
effective?


This is what the CIA was telling Clinton, by the way:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/721_reports/jan_jun1998.html#iraq

Do you think this is a real story or is the April 1 dateline telling?

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/31/1080544556813.html?from=storyrhs&oneclick=true

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