The big C.J. Chivers piece in the New York Times is well done and thorough. It has the potential to make us all a lot smarter, but given how the other side plays, it’s most likely to make our political discourse even dumber.
Here’s a couple of things to keep in mind.
Despite Dick Cheney setting up an alternative intelligence outfit to rival our official intelligence community, we never heard a peep from his people or his many reporters-on-retainer about our military running across chemical weapon ordinance in Iraq during our occupation there.
Is this because the Pentagon didn’t tell them about it? Or is it because the chemical munitions we were finding were supplied by America and its allies, particularly Germany, Italy, and Spain?
For one reason or another, and the Pentagon isn’t commenting, our military’s policy was to cover-up any discoveries of chemical weapons. Who made that our policy?
The haphazard way that these munitions were discovered, usually mixed randomly into generic stockpiles, shows that Saddam Hussein didn’t have any kind of organized inventory of his so-called “WMD.” If he was expected to produce every shell containing mustard gas or sarin, there was no way for him to comply. He may have run a brutal dictatorship with some effectiveness and efficiency, but he couldn’t do the same with his armed forces.
These weapons posed a bigger problem in post-Saddam Iraq than they did when he was in power, and now that Islamic State has some of the shells, we should expect them to begin poisoning themselves inadvertently and to use them on the battlefield as low-grade explosives with the potential to terrorize people.
In the big picture, this isn’t much of a problem, as the munitions are old and unreliable and mainly a risk to anyone who tries to handle them.
But we will have to endure a new round of idiots telling us that we found the WMD after all.
Yes, we found buried shells that were harming no one and we let the insurgency use them in roadside bombs while our own bomb-removal soldiers were exposed to blistering agents. And then we let Islamic State have them.
Heckuva job.
