Danish and Icelandic forces have located 36 chemical weapons shells containing a blister agent north of Basra. These shells, however, have likely been buried for several years and are not in anything remotely like usable condition. More than likely they were weapons that were buried before or shortly after the Gulf War in 1992.
At the same time, this discovery is illustrative of the barriers inherent in the hunt for WMDs in Iraq. We have been scouring the country for months looking for chemical and biological weapons – yet this cache of shells has gone entirely undetected until now. Finding even the 18,000 liters of anthrax spores that UNSCOM could not account for in 1998 could be exceptionally difficult – while that seems like a large amount, it could easily fit in a few hundred 50 gallon drums that could be buried anywhere in Iraq’s vast expanses of empty desert.
On the other hand, it could be that US forces are looking in the wrong country.
Syrian Journalist Nizar Najoef has given a dramatic interview with the Dutch paper De Telegraaf in which he claims that Syria is hiding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He claims that Saddam arranged with a relative of Syrian President Bashar Assad to smuggle Iraq’s weapons into Syria. Iraq’s missile technology was spirited away to the Syrian underground missile base near al-Baida. Iraqi chemcal and biological weapons were taken to the Syrian military facilities at Tal Snan and Sjinsjar near the Lebanese border.
Indeed, there are Syrian military facilities at those locations, some of which could easily be related to WMD production and storage.
Is Najoef’s story accurate? It would be difficult to confirm short of capturing those facilities. However, knowing the porous nature of the Iraq/Syria border and the relationship between the Hussein regime and the Syrians it is well within the realm of possibility for Najoef’s story to be entirely accurate.
I think you should just go for it, and invade Syria, and if you don’t find anything again, keep gossiping on the next country, and take over any country you think WMDs may be stored in, emprison thousands of people without a fair trial, collect all data from anywhere you can in large electronic databases, have a strict control on all individuals moves, reform all governments with american monitoring in the whole world, and then, and only then, we would all live in a free and democratic world!
Or wouldn’t we?
So if this illustrates the difficulty of finding WMD (which you are correct to say that it does, Jay), then why were administration officials before and during the war insisting to the public that we knew where the caches were?
You can never understand the “taste” of sugar of you never had it. The same, you can never understand how bad the regime in syria is unless you lived there. Syria has been testing Sarin Gaz on Lebanese and syrian political Prisonners. The are many documents and photos proofing those acts. Not to mention that the Syrian regime killed arround 30,000 syrian citizen in one week. “and to make sure that no one survived, the syrian army brought nurve gaz …” a report from the Hama Masacre. The point is that Syria has the Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Syria already used the weapons before. Syria invaded Lebanon and has a complete control over the country killing 240,000 civilian out of 3 million total population. It is like killing 22 million american! relative to the population.
The US MUST change the regime in syria and automaticly in Lebanon. Syria Has been supporting Terrorism since the 60th. It is not by mistake that ,when all the world was watching the status of Saddam Falling down and the people throwing their shoes on it, the syrian people did not knew about it. The Syrian regime did not allow those images, fearing the same fame. For your informaiton , there are more status in Syria than their are in iraq. Check this: Saddam vs. Assad