Battle of the Hundred-Percenters
In my view, the key issue as to whether there is any real significance to the recent chemical weapon disclosures is whether the weapons are still usable and dangerous.
The L.A. Times finally gets around to mentioning the story this evening (it didn’t make today’s dead trees edition), by reprinting an AP story on its web site, which you can read here. I call this story the “battle of the hundred-percenters.” First, David Kay:
[Kay] said experts on Iraq’s chemical weapons are in “almost 100 percent agreement” that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.
“It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point,” Kay said.
And any of Iraq’s 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said.
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld says they are WMD; they are “harmful to human beings.” Of course, so are those things under the kitchen sink. Then we have House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra:
“David Kay says anything produced prior to 1991 is not lethal anymore, so what is the discrepancy here?” Hoekstra said. “I am 100 percent sure if David Kay had the opportunity to look at the reports that describe these things, he would agree with the finding that … these things are lethal and deadly,” Hoekstra said.
I don’t understand why Hoekstra doesn’t understand what the discrepancy is.
There’s an awful lot of certainty floating around on this, but the actual facts are emerging very, very slowly.
Meanwhile, another tidbit emerges: this group of 500 shells was not found all in the same place:
Intelligence officials said the munitions were found in ones, twos and maybe slightly larger collections over the past couple of years.
So much for the mental image many have had of a pile of hundreds of gas-filled shells, piled up one on top of the other.
I’d like to see these intelligence officials going on record with this information. Where is the need for anonymity? The public has a right to know what the significance of these materials is, and who is saying so.
The public has a right to know? That certainly would be an enlightened change from the George W. administration.
nosh (d8da01) — 6/22/2006 @ 8:07 pmPatrick–
I’m not sure you and I are reading the same document. Where are the onesys and twosys mentioned in Negroponte’s memo to Santorum and Hoekstra? It doesn’t matter one bit whether these WMD rounds were found here and there, what does matter is that the blowhards like Hans Blix and Charles Duelfur didn’t find them. Were any of these rounds considered lethal? At this point I don’t know, and neither do you and 99.999% of the blogsphere. What bothers me most is that both Santorum and Hoekstra have access to the documents in question, and they are stating in no uncertain terms that there is a lot more information in these documents that will give us great cause for concern.
Mescalero (4997f5) — 6/22/2006 @ 9:25 pmWere any of these rounds considered lethal? At this point I don’t know, and neither do you and 99.999% of the blogsphere.
Agreed. I don’t think I’ve claimed that I do know.
I’d like Hoekstra to show the documents to Kay, if he’s so sure about Kay’s reaction.
Patterico (50c3cd) — 6/22/2006 @ 9:34 pmThe “onesys and twosys” disclosure came from an anonymous briefing for reporters today.
Subsequent reporting terms the find, “examples of munitions.” I’ve seen nada indicating the report literally itemizes 500 agent-filled shells. The count could include close-by chemical rounds that are empty.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/22/AR2006062201839.html
steve (a1a49e) — 6/22/2006 @ 10:04 pmPatrick–
That’s the point, and David Kay has absolutely nothing new to say, so far. Santorum and Hoekstra say that there is a lot of new information, and I have been informed by other sources that this information doesn’t look good for those who chant “Bush lied while good men died”! Don’t show the documents to just David Kay, show them to all of us so we can make up our own minds.
Mescalero (4997f5) — 6/22/2006 @ 10:09 pmP, I said in my very first post on this matter that these things had been picked up piecemeal since 2003. that’s what puzzled me about the delay in their declassification–no sources and methods were compromised, they just found them in the course of uncovering Iraqi ammo dumps and caches. I was never under the impression that they were all in a single stack and I don’t think many commenters were.
Rumsfeld also said some of them currently contain sarin gas and are dangerous. Actually he said “dangerous” three times. Isn’t that your criterion? I think that means they were dangerous. And if two soldiers were hospitalized by a sarin round in 2004, what does that say about their inefficiency?
In any case I think you have your test wrong. You’ve moved the goalpost by demanding that the WMD’s were all in perfect working order. The value of WMD’s comes only partially from their ability to destroy the enemy. It comes mainly from their ability to compel or deter an enemy who wants to avoid being destroyed.
If I pull a gun on you and order you to give me your car, the threat is credible. Whether or not the bullets are corroded–maybe even half of them–is not the point. You are not required to determine the working condition of my gun before you fire first in self-defense.
We’ve just proven, however, that in this case the suspect did in fact have a gun, as the witnesses claimed he did all along.
See-Dubya (f2a87c) — 6/22/2006 @ 10:35 pmdamn, i have wmd’s right under my sink, i could blow up my gazebo as some kind of political statement if i get really bored!
assistant devil's advocate (375260) — 6/23/2006 @ 12:13 amIf I pull a gun on you and order you to give me your car, the threat is credible. Whether or not the bullets are corroded–maybe even half of them–is not the point. You are not required to determine the working condition of my gun before you fire first in self-defense.
Mickey Kaus has made this analogy before, and I think it works, which is why I say we were right to do what we did, when we did it.
But it’s still a valid question to ask: knowing what we know now, would we have done the same thing? That’s where the usability of the weapons comes into play. Because we’re still suffering casualties weekly as a result of what we decided to do based on limited information then.
Patterico (50c3cd) — 6/23/2006 @ 12:21 amDang. Thought I just thought of that today.
Why is “knowing what we know now” the right question to ask? Where does that get us?
Had I known what I know now, I should have sold my old D&D books and bought stock in oil companies back in 2000. But what use is that kind of hindsight, especially when WMD’s were only one of several reasons for the war?
See-Dubya (f2a87c) — 6/23/2006 @ 12:25 amThe way I look at it is this: knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have supported the decision to go to war.
But I’m one of those odd ducks who supported it because of the WMD — or, to get more nuanced, because we all knew Saddam had WMD, and he hadn’t accounted for them, and he had promised to do so as a condition of a cease-fire. And he had thumbed his nose at us for years, and it was unacceptable to allow this to continue post-9/11.
Reality is: we had to operate on the information we had. And we did. And I don’t blame Bush for doing so. I’d have made the same decision, and I supported it at the time — albeit reluctantly, because I am, at heart, an anti-war type fellow.
I’m just also a realist.
So: now we’re there, and we’re stuck. We have to make the best of it.
But it sure would be nice to feel like I would have made the same decision today, knowing what I know now.
That’s all.
Patterico (50c3cd) — 6/23/2006 @ 12:31 amPatterico –
It might help to review the relevant entries here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/iraqchron.html
In particular, Russia and France – for reasons we suspected then and know well now, including the Oil for Food fiasco – were readying to force the lifting of the operative UN Resolutions and, with it, ending intrusive oversight of Iraq and the sanctions. One place that lists the UN resolutions is here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect2.html
Once those operative, existing UN Resolutions were lifted, Iraq and Saddam Hussein would have been free to resume all weapons programs, with all his hatred of us and the resources of oil-rich Iraq. I am confident that world-wide Islamic opinion would have been that SH had defeated US/Britain, that US/Britain were ripe, and that Euro/Russia could always be bribed to avert consequences. One son of mine has had a tour in Iraq, was wounded, and will be going back soon, and another may have to go, but I prefer this world over the one we would have had otherwise.
jim (6482d8) — 6/23/2006 @ 5:34 amAt the time we invaded Iraq, I believed that the invasion was justified. I believed that because I trusted the primary justification for the war: Iraq possessed WMDs, Iraq was actively trying to develop WMDs, and (most importantly) those WMDs posed a realistic threat to the US because the WMDs could have made their way into the hands of terrorists interested in attacking America.
In hindsight, to the best of our knowledge, it turns out that Iraq did not have an active WMD program (whether they would have restarted a program given the opportunity is a separate discussion) and Iraq did not possess WMDs that posed a realistic threat to the US. The 500 shells mentioned by Santorum and Hoekstra in no way contradict those two points, so how are they relevant to the debate over the primary justification that was used to support the invasion of Iraq?
unceph (baacf9) — 6/23/2006 @ 7:44 amPS – The gun analogy is silly. Iraq never “pulled a gun” on us nor did it demand that we give Iraq our car. A more apt analogy:
Iraq, a street thug who has committed crimes in the past (crimes for which we were part of the reprisal team) is still slinking around back alleys, despite our requirement that Iraq stop doing so. We know that Iraq owned a gun in the past, which we took away, and we are worried that Iraq may either already have or be in the process of trying to acquire a new gun. Iraq has never threatened us with violence, nor could it do so directly, but we are worried that, if Iraq did acquire a gun, it might lend it to someone else who would be willing to use it against us.
Iraq claims repeatedly that it doesn’t own a gun, but we don’t believe Iraq. So we break into Iraq’s house, ransack it, and after repeated searchings we find some old gun shells on the floor of the closet and under the bed. It is unclear whether or not the shells could still be used, but it is clear that the shells were purchased back when Iraq had its old gun.
Given our initial suspicion (that Iraq had a new gun and might lend it to people interested in shooting us), was our search and ransacking warranted?
unceph (baacf9) — 6/23/2006 @ 7:55 amSaddam’s had it coming for a long time, and he struck against the US years before the Gulf War. Remember way back when a US warship was hit by one of Saddam’s missiles?
Black Jack (d8da01) — 6/23/2006 @ 11:48 am1) Can we invite Mr Kay to help open these harmless shells, please ? Without protective gear – well, let’s be humanitarian – he can do it outside, with a 2 knot breeze blowing past him and then past the shells he is opening … after all,
“[Kay] said experts on Iraq’s chemical weapons are in “almost 100 percent agreement” that sarin nerve agent produced from the 1980s would no longer be dangerous.
“It is less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink at this point,” Kay said.
And any of Iraq’s 1980s-era mustard would produce burns, but it is unlikely to be lethal, Kay said. “
2) Patterico @ 13:31 – knowing what I know now, with Saddam deposed, with the funding eliminated that his regime gave out to terrorists (and their supporters and families), with the sanctuary he could offer no longer available to the munkar al Qaeda, with the number of al Qaeda folk currently decomposing (rather than composing new attacks), with the elimination of Saddam’s abilities to supply WMDs of any sort to terrorists, with the effect it had on Libya, all in all, Dubya done (and is doing) good ! (IMHO, of course!)
Alasdair (0c1945) — 6/23/2006 @ 5:23 pm