Saddam had all kinds of nasty stuff, including:

5,000 sarin-filled 122mm rockets
44,500 liters of GB/GF
120 liters of GB
5,000 liters of D4
1,100 liters of dichlorethane
16.5 tons of thiodiglycol
5.5 tons of mustard agent

This is only what the UNSCOM inspectors had evidence of. They had eveidence of a huge amount (tons) of additional precursor agents, but could not find them.

I believe Cheney may have said something related to satellite photos showing convoys of trucks heading to Syria. Other reports on this state they went all the way to the Bekka Valley in Lebanon. Nice.

I also remember a couple accidents I had in Chem labs with very small amounts of much less lethal gases. I give it a lot of respect. Skin. Eyes. Lungs. So much immediate threat. Then, brain damage, dna damage, cancers.

If gases unpredictably disperse depending on air flows why could they not also be more lethal than expected? Of course, they can. With these poisons, it doesn’t take much to ruin you. My grandfather served in WWI. My grandparents talked about soldiers who were exposed to mustard gas. They said a lot of them were ‘nuts’ after one exposure. Permanently.

One shell makes a war criminal IMHO. They are too easy to use if the perp doesnt care about his own health.

Last night I watched Hannity & Colmes. Senator Rick Santorum and Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan were on, talking about the WMDs found in Iraq. Of course, you won’t hear much about the story in the MSM. There wasn’t even a mention in my daily ……

Point 2: As to whether Chemical weapons can kill more people than a bomb, the amount of people killed is determined by more factors than just the agent used. Also, the reason chemical and biological agents are such a horror is not because of the number of they kill in one application, it’s about the horrific way they kill people. The description of death by VX gas given by Nicolas Cage in the movie “The Rock” is a pretty accurate description. Victims will literally convulse so hard that they break their own spine. Deaths caused by these agents are at least gruesome. Now, you can argue the relevance of gruesomeness to how “bad” a weapon is if you want, but that’s where the stigma with chemical and biological weapons comes from.

Point 3: The war in Iraq was justified with or without chemical weapons.

Point 4: There have been documents found suggesting the Russians moved large amounts of weaponary from Iraq prior to the last invasion.

Over and over, we keep finding proof that Saddam DID still have weapons of mass destruction (the new declassified fax is here), he DID have ties to al Qaeda, and Bush’s policy in Iraq is winning, not losing. It seems that the Left, for all its claims….

It is true, but you would never know form the MSM. ON today’s front page of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, they is not a word about what was said yesterday. Actually all of what was said is old news…

At http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/21/224455/881

It starts…

“PA-Sen: Santorum Makes Shit Up”

Interestingly enough, they credit Hot Air as the 1st accurate report (see: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/21/185253/434)

Poster “smintheus” notes: “As several posters report, who ventured into right blogistan and returned intact, even some of the wingnuts aren’t buying the little Ricky show. It was obvious from the start that this “news” was going to be partisan hackery.”

The take on the left is that a WMD first has to be a WEAPON, and that these shells were no longer weapons, because they were not in “usable condition.” That’s their story and they’re sticking to it!

I’m no expert on WMD, so I have no idea what the expected “shelf life” of an Iraqi WMD is. However, there is an article at http://www.britainusa.com/iraq/other_show.asp?Sarticletype=2&other_ID=493 that states:

Chemical weapons, particularly the skin blister agent “mustard”, have a notoriously long shelf life and indeed such shells derived from the first world war continue to be discovered and require destruction and disposal. US and Russian weapons currently being destroyed by OPCW that were manufactured years ago and are predicted to have a residual shelf life of at least a further ten years.

In Iraq shells containing mustard were discovered in August 1997, which were manufactured in the late 1980s, and were found to contain mustard of 98% purity.

Nerve agents have a considerably shorter “shelf life” although certain “stabilisers” will prolong their storage and Iraq has not provided details to provide a technical assessment of their durability.

Iraq has a break out capability and as such the shelf life is irrelevant.

Iraq has the expertise, knowledge and experience to produce militarily significant quantities of VX, sarin, tabun and mustard of exceptional purity.

While some of these shells may not be “like new,” clearly they are still dangerous, especially the mustard ones.

But this just begs the question: Saddam stated that he destroyed them after the Gulf War — and their existance is proof that he didn’t. Hence the UN Security Council Resolutions were not complied with, and Saddam was in violation. And our invasion remains justified.

Both Drs. Pat Santy and Charles Krauthhamer say that the paranoia that afflicts the moonbats is not affected or tempered in any way by reason much less evidence that they are wrong.

So the exist in denial, and still tell their lies.

These 500 shells, if fall into the terrorists’ hands, could be extremely threatening to our troops at the base camps.

I think I’ve now asked for the 48th time. Anyone? Beuller?

As someone noted above, all of this is irrelevent: as soon as Saddam violated the post-1991 cease fire agreement and any of the 17 U.N. resolutions in the next 12 years (especially 1441 – the final resolution calling for “serious consequences”), war was fully justified.

The first time he fired at a coalition aircraft illegally, we could have been justified in invading.

As for the WMDs – of COURSE he had them. He used them. How much remains in the country, or may have been spirited off to Syria or Iran, is of academic interest I suppose, but irrelevent to the argument for war.

He didn’t allow inspections to re-commence. That’s all that matters. He violated the resolutions. Period. End of story.

I assume we’ll be finding at least small quantities of WMDs for years to come. I don’t much care. I know why we went to war and why it was right.

And if we find a carbon copy of the Enola Gay sitting in a hangar loaded for bear, liberals still won’t admit they were wrong.

And when that first WMD is triggered in the U.S. – and it will happen – do you think liberals will admit they were wrong? Of course not. They’ll blame Bush for not doing more.

Like I said … its all 2003 redux. None of it matters.

Move along, nothing to see here. Ha!…

So we’re told. Also, Gen Georges Sada tells us saddam was loading passenger jets stripped of seats with all manner of nasty, banned things and sending them to Syria. Then let’s not forget that because Turkey refused to let us attack from the north, we had to get all the way across Iraq before we could even think of stopping anything that might be leaving for Syria while we were headed in.

Why in the world would he leave the good stuff laying around for us to find?

And no one is saying that they are.

We went to war for various reasons, as Ann Coulter pointed out on H&C. She also quipped that ‘if [these weapons] are so harmless, let’s bury them in a liberals’ backyard.’

Not a bad idea.

And will the real John Murtha please stand up…

Senator Rick Santorum is in a race for his political life. This could explain why he is trumpeting a 2 year old report he requested to have declassified that confirms the fact of chemical weapons found in Iraq.

There are several caveats that have to…

My explanation of why most of the nasty stuff in this report is older than what one might expect, is because it IS mostly old stuff, and just wasn’t in the current (2002-2003) inventories kept by the Iraqis, and/or considered important enough to get shipped out to Syria or back to Russia in the last few days prior to the invasion.

The stuff we have found is just “moldy leftovers, lost in the back of the ‘fridge”, not the fresh meat that went back to the butchers when they realized that the power was about to go out.