Soldiers found an artillery shell that discharged and contained a chemical they believe to be Serine gas. Further testing is being done to confirm. Could this mean that Sadam did have Weapons of mass destruction or was this a fluke? Set up even?
Well, we know that Saddam DID have weapons of mass destruction. The UN confirmed it. If this shell turns out to be the real deal though, there's a good chance that it's left over from that old stockpile. I don't expect this to be evidence that he had an ongoing weapons program after the time he claimed to have destroyed his weapons.
If this is the real thing, then it'll be a remnant of the chemical artillery rounds Saddam stockpiled during the 1980s. There are bound to be a few left over not destroyed by UNSCOM and UNMOVIC. My guess would be that the fighters are raiding the deepest and darkest of the Iraqi army's weapons caches and came across these things buried in some dingy corner. A sign of stockpiles of WMD? No. More importantly, a sign of active WMD programs? Definitely not.
They also found something like 40 chemical shells (mustard gas I think) buried somewhere a while ago too, if I remember correctly, but nothing that posed a direct threat to anyone besides Israel. What we're seeing now is that Sadaam didn't have nearly as many WMD as we thought (or else he just sold them to the Syrians so he could buy more viagra, who knows?), and his "programs" were just dream projects that he couldn't actually hope to afford in a million years. No, he was more concerned with hoarding golden toilets and killing babies than preparing for holy war. It's still for the best that he's gone though, since if he ever did come across a nuke he'd have no qualms selling it to the PLO so they could wipe Jerusalem off the map.
Yeah I mean, come on people, you can't blame bush for thinking he had WMD. After all, America gave them to him in the first place. Give Bush a break man. His intentions were good!
Read Hans Blix's very thorough UNMOVIC reports. What stockpiles still remained from the 1980s were very effectively destroyed between 1991 and 2003. And this "trucked to Syria" myth - not exactly sure where that first came from, but it's clearly nonsense! Besides it being exceedingly unlikely - not to mention logistically impossible - show me one scrap of evidence!
Just did a bit of searching, because both sides of this issue get bandied around a lot and I have no idea which is true. Probably we'll never get entirely to the bottom of it, but there does seem to be some evidence that Iraq's universities obtained strains of toxic pathogens from the ATCC in Maryland in the late 1980s. They would not have been sold to Iraq as "WMDs" - clearly that would be illegal, but they might have been suppplied for "scientific research purposes". Just so happens they can *also* be used for biological warfare agents. This would also be in line with the USA's policy of arming Iraq for its ongoing war against fundamentalist Iran during the same period...
The U.S. did not give Iraq WMD's, and someone on here has yet to prove they did. I challenge anyone on here to find a reliable source that clearly shows so as well.
Did you read what I just wrote? Type ATCC + Iraq into Google and you'll find a wealth of evidence on the matter of biological pathogens.
The U.S. was one of the smallest supplier of arms to Iraq. Even if it was biological weapons, that is not a weapon of mass destruction. If that were the case, no one would be bitching at Bush right now about the WMD fiasco, considering they have found Mustard and Saron gas in Iraq.
