Santorum and the chemical weapons

As a dog returns to it's vomit, so the Republican chickenhawks return to their warmongering lies about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

A report unveiled by Senator Rick Santorum revealed that U.S. forces had found degraded, useless and empty reminants of Iraq's pre-1991 chemical weapons -- weapons which had been built by Iraq with the full knowledge of then American President Ronald Reagan, who was happy for Saddam Hussein to have chemical weapons while he was using them to kill Kurdish terrorists and Iranians. Santorum crowed loudly that these broken-down pieces of junk proved that the U.S. cover story for the invasion of Iraq was justified.

So how does this work? Artillery shells left over from the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, degraded and almost useless, prove that Iraq was a serious threat to world peace? Suuuure they do.

Juan Cole lists ten reasons why these aren't the weapons of mass destruction the U.S. went to war over:

1. The authors of Cobra II show that before the 2003 Iraq War, Saddam called his top generals together and let them know that he did not in fact have any WMD any more. They were allegedly shaken and disturbed.


2. The Saddam regime faced certain destruction in March-April 2003, but no Iraqi military unit deployed any WMD to save themselves.

In addition, the U.S. Defence Department consider's Santorum's claims to be bogus:

Fox News’ Jim Angle contacted the Defense Department who quickly disavowed Santorum and Hoekstra’s claims. A Defense Department official told Angle flatly that the munitions hyped by Santorum and Hoekstra are “not the WMD’s for which this country went to war.”

The Australian writes:

"This is an incredibly, in my mind, significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false," Senator Santorum said.

A Pentagon official who confirmed the findings said that all the weapons were pre-1991 vintage munitions "in such a degraded state they couldn't be used for what they are designed for."

The official, who asked not to be identified, said most were 155 mm artillery projectiles with mustard gas or sarin of varying degrees of potency.

That's Senator Santorum's "incredibly significant finding". At least he is honest -- it is only significant in his mind, not in reality.

"Varying degrees of potency" -- between what? None and two parts of bugger all?

In reality, by no stretch of the imagination are 155mm artillery projectiles "weapons of mass destruction". Chemical weapons are vicious for many reasons, but massively destructive they are not. If you want to see weapons of mass destruction, you should look at the American MOAB bomb, or any one of the 10,000+ nuclear weapons the U.S. still maintains, with approximately 7,000 in active duty and 3,000 in reserve. Military planners know what chemical weapons are good for: they are quick and dirty area-denial weapons, psychological weapons, but not weapons of mass destruction. For mass destruction you need a big bomb.

If you aren't convinced, consider the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The Japanese terrorists used approximately ten litres of sarin, enough to theoretically kill more than 10,000,000 people. What were the results of this attack?

Twelve people died. A further 5,510 patients were treated in hospitals, 17 of whom were critically ill, 37 severely ill, and 984 moderately ill, mostly complaining about vision problems. The rest were not affected but were "worried well", people who thought they could have been poisoned but weren't.

A terrible crime, true, but hardly mass destruction. Mass disruption more than anything else. Had the terrorists used a dozen hand grenades, they probably would have killed and injured more people and done far more damage.

So it is nonsense to describe these as "weapons of mass destruction" -- mass distraction perhaps, but that's it.

Still, they are chemical weapons, and chemical weapons are dangerous: you don't want them in the hands of just anyone, degraded or not. But sarin has a shelf-life of weeks or months; pushing to the limits of technology might give it a year's shelf-life. Even if the Iraqis had managed a miracle, within a decade the sarin nerve gas would degrade away into harmlessness.

Mustard gas munitions have a longer shelf-life. In ideal circumstances, they can remain effective for a decade or more, although the chaos of Iraq makes ideal circumstances most unlikely. It is just conceivable that some of those 500 shells might have been mustard gas shells in more-or-less working condition.

Nobody in their right mind wants to come into contact with mustard gas, any more than they want to pour caustic soda over their skin. Mustard gas isn't so much a poison as a corrosive, blistering agent, similar in some ways to powerful acids or bases. It isn't especially deadly unless it gets in the lungs. In World War One, less than 1% of soldiers affected by mustard gas died, making it significantly less effective at killing the enemy than bullets. It was used for the psychological effect, and to disrupt enemy activities, rather than kill.

But even if these shells were in absolute pristine condition, Santorum's notion that the U.S., the world's only superpower, had something to fear from a few hundred short-range artillery shells is laughably ridiculous. You might as well go to war because Iraqi plumbers used caustic soda to clean out the drains. (Mustard gas is more effective as a weapon than caustic soda, but there is a lot more caustic soda available, and it can kill: people have died from being forced to swallow drain cleaner.)

But of course, they weren't in pristine condition. As admitted by the Pentagon official, those weapons which had been armed are all obsolete and degraded, and wouldn't have worked as they were designed. That doesn't mean they were harmless -- some of them could have contained explosives designed to disperse the chemical agent, and even degraded explosives can blow your head off. Also, while sarin is rendered harmless in just weeks, mustard gas remains corrosive for years or even decades. Old World War One mustard gas shells are still capable of causing serious burns and injuries. But they aren't effective weapons -- they are difficult to use, likely to fail or misfire, and unlikely to hurt more than a few people.

Iraq manufactured tens of thousands of chemical shells during the war with Iran. Of course some of these shells, empty or full, would be forgotten or abandoned. This is not news: the Iraq Survey Group declared back in 2004:

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

A few hundred empty or degraded weapons left over from the 1980s is no justification for going to war. The military value of those weapons is zero, in fact they were a liability: too little to deter an attack, but they gave the aggressors an excuse to invade.