Wait One Damn Minute!!- Saddam Hussein Had A Chemical Weapons Plant!!

http://article.wn.com/view/2014/06/19/ISIL_seizes_Saddams_chemical_weapons_plant/

Reportedly the ISIS has seized control of Saddam Hussein's best chemical weapons plant and it STILL has stockpiles of Sarin, VX, and mustard gas.

What happened what we've been hearing about for 12 years about "Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq".

Now, you can say "oh they're old" (20 years plus).

Who gives a damn. Lots of old weapons still work fine. The U.S. was using bombs built in WW2 during the Vietnam War.

The U.S. was firing 16 inch gun rounds from the Iowa class battleship forty years later in Desert Storm.

At any rate, supposedly, Iraq had NO WMDs which means NO CHEMICAL WEAPONS. And in fact supposedly had NO ABILITY to build them.

Lots of people owe Bush/Cheney a big apology.

So the weapons were around 8 years old when we invaded in 2003. Let he who is without sin get gassed and see how it plays out.
I knew they had them, and that they took a lot of them to Syria (Swiss cheese border) in the frantic weeks before we invaded.
I also knew they wouldn't use them, because we would pull out all the stops, and all the high tech talent hauled ass anyway so they couldn't pull it off.
But hard core crazy fuckers? I wouldn't put it past them.

You know, don't you, that in the early days of the invasion, we found a cleverly disguised chemical weapons plant with shells the same age as those, and even the Bush Administration said that they were fucking useless and could in no way be considered a viable threat.

The plant had already been cleared by UN inspectors prior to the war and rendered useless as any sort of military production facility, according to a story linking from your link:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/10181480/ISIL-seizes-Saddams-chemical-weapons-plant

^Ah the UN. Weapons inspectors led by the same Hans Blix IIRC who openly said he would "NEVER declare Iraq in violation of UN resolutions" because it was not his job to "justify a war".

Pretty much says it all.

1) Iraq was not supposed to have ANY WMDs. Not 20 years old. Not 10 years old. Not three days old just off the production line.

And for that matter, they were not supposed to have ANY means of manufacturing WMDs.

2) No one ever made a serious claim that Iraq had SS-18s (Soviet ICBMs) ready to launch. Never understood why the expectations were similar to that when it wasn't claimed.

And the Bush Administration. Did you miss that part, or will you denounce George Bush the way you denied the validity of Biblical quotes that offend you? Next thing you know, you'll be denouncing the Great God Reagan and the rest of us will have to watch out for winged swine.

These things fit the definition of chemical weapons and thus WMDs.

One of the three great mistakes of the Bush Admin. invasion of Iraq was that they did not highlight these and point out that Saddam Hussein did indeed have chemical weapons (and thus WMDs).

Instead the Bush Admin. decided that the WMD issue "did not need to be reargued" and chose not to make their case. Thus allowing anti war zealots to tar the Bush Admin. with the claim that they lied about WMDs.

I don't recall anyone claiming that the Iraqis had chemical weapons mounted on missile warheads ready to strike at a moments notice. No one expected that and if the claim was made it was just exaggeration.

Point is, by the definition of WMDs. Saddam Hussein in 2003 had weapons of mass destruction that he was not allowed to have under any existing UN resolutions.

Dayton is so desperate, he's ready to swallow lies that even Bush and Cheney didn't try to peddle.

Here's a hint, Dayton: there is not one sane person who ever claimed Iraq never had a WMD program. The claim then, and subsequently proven beyond doubt, was that the program was ended, and the stockpile rendered useless.

Once again, they were supposed to have NO WMDs. NO chemical weapons. No left over chemical weapons.

Now, as for the Bush Admin. I've heard that the Bush Admin. didn't want to revisit the issue after the invasion was over and done with anyway. Like I said. Their mistake.

Finally, even degraded chemical weapons can still be quite lethal.

Question. What is their definition for "rendered useless?" In the US, we burn the chemical and biological agents in an incinerator, neutralizing them. They cease to exist. If we're talking about simply removing them from shells and bombs and storing agents in barrels, they are very, very far from militarily useless.

Frankly, I don't buy the age argument. The vast majority of what remains of the US' stockpile of chemical weapons was produced in the 1960's. Even when it was 40+ years old, FEMA and the DoD were still projecting millions of casualties if there had been an incident at the Anniston Army Depot when those weapons were being incinerated.

It's been a while since I was up to speed on this, but I would assume it means the agents are rendered inert. It would be quite dangerous to burn some of these things, but that doesn't mean the only alternative was storage.

Yeah. It was an honest question. I'm curious. I guess I need to go to Google.

Remember in the early days of the Afghan War, how people thought that the Taliban would be able to use the old Stinger missiles, that the US had given them to fight the Soviets, against our forces? It turned out that while the Taliban might still have had some, they were such "delicate" weapons that the decades of rough treatment they'd gotten in the years since the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan meant that the weapons were useless. I don't think that its unreasonable to assume that the same would be said of any chemical weapons in Iraq. Even if they'd been produced in '02, just prior to the US invading, its unlikely that they could have sat around in a war torn country for 11 years and still be viable.

I posted the same thing at one of the political boards and someone linked to a DOD official speaking in 2006 that said the FIVE HUNDRED or so chemical weapons found after the 2003 invasion would still be very potent in the hands of terrorists and that "degraded" did not mean "nonlethal".

Weren't there examples of mustard gas shells from World War One plowed up by farmers DECADES later and still blistering people exposed to it.

As someone on another site said

1) They thought that the question of WMDs was almost always about NUCLEAR weapons (it wasn't).
2) What exactly constitutes a "chemical weapon"? Does it have to be something you can fire on a warhead or drop as a bomb? What about terrorists putting a couple of barrels of Sarin or VX in the back of a truck and crashing it in an urban center?

Here's what I've found so far regarding the particular plant:

So whatever materials are there, it appears they are not in any kind of usable condition.

The article is pay walled, but it's the Wall Street Journal, which I assume is a well regarded source regardless of our own politics.

This is what those hippies at Fox News have to say about it.

Oh, and that piece is from '06. I don't think I have to point out who was running the country then.

Its owned by Rupert Murdoch, so its hardly a lefty rag.

Dayton,

When you fuck George B. in the ass, does he ask for a reach around?

Do you give it to him?

Does he suck you off after you ass fuck him?

Do you make out after that?

Does the taste of cum and feces gargling in your mouth make you hard again?

Is it his turn to fuck you in the ass?

Do you squeal like a piggie?

Thanks,

Faceman

I don't want to defend Bush or the Iraq war, but if I had a meth lab and the DEA said they were coming to my house, I'd destroy my lab before they got there.

In WWII, the Allies were worried about the Germans beating them to developing nukes, and the Allies knew where one of the key components was being manufactured. They didn't wait until they could march into the country to try and take it out, nor did they "simply" try to bomb it out of existence. They launched a series of targeted operations to take that plant out, even though they knew for many of the people involved it was a suicide mission. If anyone in the US military had thought that Saddam's facilities were a serious threat to the US, then they should have done something similar. They didn't. This leaves us two possibilities:

1. They didn't believe that Saddam had anything that was a serious threat to the US.
2. They were incompetent tools and never should have been allowed anywhere near a military operation.

Take your pick. Neither speaks highly of those in charge during the Iraq War. Certainly, the fact that this facility wasn't destroyed during 11 years of occupation by US forces doesn't incline one to believe that the US was serious about searching the country for such facilities.

Nice summary at DebatePolitics.com

The administration claimed that Iraq had an ongoing Biological production program, an ongoing Chemical production program, and was seeking to establish a nuclear production program. What we found was no biological program at all, legacy chemical weapons, and enriched uranium and radioactive materials that could be used in dirty bombs. The big mushroom cloud may have been the item that captured everyone's attention (or yours, for me it was the bio stuff), but it was hardly the extent of the Administrations' WMD argument.

I served with an NCO who received mustard gas burns on his hands and arms in the early 1970s when he and his squad occupied an abandoned storage building during wargame maneuvers at Fort Still.

Apparently the building had been used to store mustard gas decades before and even though the building was empty when he was there, several soldiers in his squad whose skin came in contact with the wood (like resting their forearms on a window sill to aim a rifle outside) received terrible blisters.

We now know that Iraq didn't have WMDs but let's remember that it wasn't just Bush who thought Saddam had them. President Clinton also thought he had them as did Senators John Kerry,John Edwards, Hillary Clinton and every other democrat that voted for that resolution.

My feeling was that even if he did have them it didn't matter because Saddam Hussein was not the mastermind behind 911.

He was supporting other terrorists who had killed Americans though.

So have many other regimes across the world. Want to invade all of them too?

When teaching history, what would you do if a student fabricated a quote to support their argument?

There are a range of criteria.

Note, the police don't stop arresting criminals just because some are beyond their reach

Immaterial as to what kind of WMDs the US thought the Iraqis had, the simple fact is that by failing to attack the suspected facilities with a combination of bomb strikes and paratroopers, the Bush Administration shows that it was either unconcerned about the WMDs, or incompetent. Take your pick. There are no other options.