20 June 2014

Saddam-Era Chemical Weapons in ISIS's hands - Wait, wha?!

So the popular talking point among opponents of the invasion of Iraq in the US is that "there were no WMDs". Someone might want to tell ISIS, which just recently too control of a Saddam-era chemical weapons complex in Iraq. Soooooo... kind of wondering how long this myth is going to continue to persist in the American public.

The jihadist group bringing terror to Iraq overran a Saddam Hussein chemical weapons complex on Thursday, gaining access to disused stores of hundreds of tonnes of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin.
Isis invaded the al-Muthanna mega-facility 60 miles north of Baghdad in a rapid takeover that the US government said was a matter of concern.
The facility was notorious in the 1980s and 1990s as the locus of Saddam’s industrial scale efforts to develop a chemical weapons development programme.
Isis has shown ambitions to seize and use chemical weapons in Syria leading experts to warn last night that the group could turn to improvised weapons to carry out a deadly attack in Iraq.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former commander of Britain’s chemical weapons regiment, said that al-Muthanna has large stores of weaponized and bulk mustard gas and sarin, most of which has been put beyond ready use in concrete stores.

2 comments:

S O said...

So you think Bush's team was too stupid to find noteworthy chemical weapons quantities in Iraq while looking for it for years, but ISIS did in a few days?


Maybe Occam's Razor rather suggests ISIS has gained squat in there and the telegraph merely reported nonsense.

Brant said...

Nope. We noted in 2006 that Bush's team found them and everyone ignored the news:
http://strayvoltage.blogspot.com/2006/06/well-looks-like-they-found-some.html

The point was more poking at the people that insisted that "Bush lied and there were no WMDs in Iraq"
They were there all along, and now that they're in unfriendly hands, suddenly they're a problem for the same people who insisted that they never existed in the first place.