The Glade 4.0

Except for the 5,000 or so that were found.

Not just the few here and there that were poo-pooh'd at the time, but over 5,000.

Now, all of them were pre-1991 manufacture, but they weren't just found lying around a few at a time in dumps - like the 2,500 or so on the grounds of a facility captured by ISIS.



What the Pentagon was doing concealing this from 2003 to 2006 I can't imagine - seeing as finding WMDs was supposed to have been a priority - but the constant yammering about "There were no WMD!" was false. No active production program remained, but significant stockpiles WERE discovered, and made known to the public. The whining we heard in those years about "lying about WMD" was complete fiction. The presence of such a large stockpile of pre-1991 weapons definitely explains the appearance of a WMD program from the perspective of outside intelligence. This is not to say there was no intelligence failure (there was) but it was not what it's been made out to be.





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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Woo?

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Holy shitsnacks!

And so not only do they fail to use this to validate the war for the American public who were getting more upset by the day at the appearance of being lead into Iraq under false pretenses, they then left them there, stockpiled in the hands of the Iraqi government to be later lost to Islamic militant extremists?

You'll forgive me if I question the brain functionality of everyone involved in this.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

We didn't go to Iraq to look for WMDs. We went to look for the receipts before anybody found out where Iraq got their weapons from.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

No we didn't, mainly because they didn't "get their weapons from us" - they got dual use chemicals, admittedly a poor decision, but it is not like anyone simply handed them functional weapons. They certainly didn't get the delivery systems from us (aside from a small number of aging howitzers), which people in their haste to blame America or eagerness to by cynical and cool conveniently forget are just as important to a WMD as the contents of the warhead.

It's also not like the source of their chemical technology was any kind of secret in 1991, much less 2003.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's really not clear what the reason was at all, but it's not a matter of everyone being stupid. Large organizations never are, or they wouldn't function as organizations at all. It's more a matter of group and organizational psychology.

A great deal of blame can probably be placed at a few of the generals - Every commander prior to Petraeus exhibited major issues in fundamental understanding of what they were faced with.

The person most fundamentally responsible, in terms of creating the circumstances that allowed the insurgency to flourish and distract from the matter at hand was L. Paul Bremer. Had the Iraqi Army not been disbanded and "de-Ba'athification" attempted, the insurgency might have been much less and the handling of chemical weapons proceeded in an orderly fashion.

The American public, and everyone else, had no excuse for ever believing that false pretenses were the reason. It was quite clear early on that the intelligence community had pretty decided to look for one thing and unsurprisingly found what it was looking for. The Left saw political victory in repeating the "it was a lie!" mantra over and over until people believed it and the press aided and abetted them. That may, in part, explain the military desire to keep this information quiet. The military as a group is pathologically afraid of bad press and is constantly trying to please a portion of the public that it will never please. I'm pretty sure at some levels, the desire for one more star meant "we shouldn't put this out when they'll just accuse us of fabricating it anyhow".

It DID also come to public light no later than 2006, and that's just what the press did - pretend it was a dozen or so rusty warheads lying around, just like they ignored the fact that delivery systems that counted as WMDs were found in large numbers.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

In the 80's... ok if you want to spray a bunch of now chemicals that would not barely function as irritants...

LOL there were plenty of reports of old chem found during the war that was either given to them by us or that we financed construction and production of. No near-modern construction or supply (read as useful) has ever been found. Sure you might be able to find trace amounts of sarin amid 99.995% isopropyl methylphosphonic acid (and its more likely they checked for that than sarin during tests).

Unghhh reading a lot into an article here.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yes, the article clearly says that these were not new manufacture. However, from an outside intelligence perspective, especially one heavily reliant on satellite imagery, pre-existing weapons can look very much like an active program. You'd move and handle such weapons the same way you would new ones.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Sure if you have no other information. On the other hand if you knew you provided training and possibly some weapons and technical help in creating weapons that look exactly like that and thus knew they already had these it would be the kind of thing you look at and should go "oh those".

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

And what makes you think the weapons themselves would even be visible? Even **** countries don't normally store their chemical weapons out in the open or on uncovered flatbeads, and chemical bombs and warheads tend to be the same size and shape as conventional ones so as to fit onto standard racks, in howitzer gun tubes, etc. and have consistent ballistic properties.

Don't rely on your intuition. It seems easy to you because you have no idea of the difficulties.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I was replying to the assumption you stated "from an outside intelligence perspective, especially one heavily reliant on satellite imagery," sooooooooooooooo...

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Soooooooooooo satellite imagery is not something you can look at and just say "oh yeah, THOSE weapons" as if chemical weapons are normally handled in the open and have nice big labels on them that say "PRE 1991 WEAPON DON'T FREAK OUT 'MURICA!!". Real imagery and intelligence is not the magic Hollywood makes it seem like.

This is why the intelligence community was criticized (rightly) for overreliance on signals and imagery and neglecting human intelligence. Each type has its strengths and weaknesses; overreliance on any one leaves blind spots.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So its a bad idea to rely on satellite imagery which they did, to come up with those WMD allegations which you seem to be defending, which still aren't true.

Ok then.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Except that the WMD allegations were true, in part. The delivery systems were being produced, and Saddam did have significant chemical stocks - just not new ones. It is a bad idea to rely exclusively on satellite imagery, but that isn't the President's job to deal with - he is not an intelligence analyst or technician, nor for that matter are his secretaries and other members of his administration. They don't have time to do all that, and they pay experts good money to do it. The experts are, in turn, working in a field where incomplete and unclear information and making probability estimates rather than certain declarations are the norm. Human intelligence assets are available as they are available. More might have been developed with more effort, but possibly not.

You don't get to use hindsight to say "well, the WMD accusations weren't true after the fact, so obviously that means that someone was doing something they shouldn't beforehand" then turn around and reject hindsight later when it comes back that "and oh yeah by the way there was enough evidence of WMD that it made things look worse than they actually were at the time." In fact, just don't judge people's actions in light of hindsight, period. Actions should be judged based on the information available and the circumstances of the time.

You're just fishing for a point so that you don't have to confront that there wasn't any intentional misrepresentation of anything.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."