After spending more than a year attacking the Bush administration
daily for their supposed failure to produce the WMDs that everyone
-- including the
United Nations, as well as most
leading Democrats -- believed Saddam had hidden, the Left has
suddenly gone strangely silent on the subject. The "mainstream"
media has been tiptoeing around the discovery of a 155-mm
mortar shell containing Sarin gas in Iraq, the contents of which
have
been confirmed. The shell was used as part of an improvised
explosive device (IED) on a road near the Baghdad International
Airport, and exploded as it was being disarmed.
The shell contained three liters of Sarin -- nearly a gallon. It
was a type of shell designed to mix chemical components during flight,
which was why the explosion didn't kill anyone (though two soldiers
were treated for exposure). Three liters of Sarin is enough, if
the components are mixed properly, to realistically kill hundreds,
and potentially thousands. A concentration of 100
milligrams of Sarin per cubic meter of air is enough to constitute
a lethal dose for half the people breathing it within one minute.
This type of chemical warfare shell had never been declared by
Iraq -- it was not even known that Iraq had ever made them.
The 1999 UNSCOM report on Iraq reported that thirty
binary/Sarin shells were known to exist, and stated that all
had been accounted for. According
to UNSCOM, "Iraq developed a crude type of binary munition,
whereby the final mixing of the two precursors to the agent was
done inside the munition just before delivery." Someone actually
had to physically pour the components of the Sarin (or other
type of G-series
nerve agent) into the shells before they could be fired.
At least, that's how the ones we knew about worked.
So, a previously-unknown type of artillery shell is found in Iraq,
containing an actual, verifiable chemical weapon. This is front
page news, right? Should we expect apologies from formerly doubting
Liberals? Newspapers filled with retractions from prominent Democrats?
Conciliatory visits to President Bush from Jaques Chirac
and Gerhardt Schroeder? Not so fast. Remember: it's an election
year. Liberals, Democrats, terrorists and appeasers all want President
Bush to lose the election so everyone can get back to
business as usual. Terrorists want to get back to their implacable war
against Western civilisation, and the others want to get back to trying
to placate them. The media, as long as we let them get
away with it, will only run stories that attack President Bush and
undermine support for him. In fact, Liberals already have their
spin on this Sarin find ready to go. The vast majority of them --
when you can get them to admit that the Sarin and the shell are
real -- argue that it doesn't matter for one of four "reasons."
A. The shell is old, from before the 1991 Gulf War, so it's
not what we were looking for.
Since the cease-fire
that suspended the Gulf War depended on Saddam's handing over
to the UN "[a]ll chemical and biological weapons and all stocks
of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research,
development, support and manufacturing facilities", this shell is
precisely what we were looking for, especially if
it predates 1991. This shell and others like it is why the UN passed
17
resolutions demanding that Saddam disarm. No matter how
old it was, it was still lethal. There is no statute of limitations
on weapons of mass destruction.
B. There is only one shell, not a stockpile, so it doesn't mean
anything.
This one shell contained enough WMD material to potentially kill
as many people as died on 9/11, all by itself. Is it logical
to assume that this is the only one in existence -- or just wishful
thinking? The fact is that we
still don't know how much Sarin Iraq actually produced.
"At first, Iraq told UNSCOM that it had produced an estimated 250
tons of tabun and 812 tons of sarin. In 1995, Iraq changed its estimates
and reported it had produced only 210 tons of tabun and 790 tons
of sarin." (Yes, that's tons.) At the very least, it
tells us that we haven't nearly finished looking for the WMDs that
Saddam was supposed to surrender, and didn't. Besides... a
shell containing mustard gas was also found. Well, maybe there
were only two WMD shells in all of Iraq.
C. Just because Saddam had WMDs after all, it doesn't mean Bush
didn't lie about them.
As ridiculous as it sounds, this appears to be the instinctive,
defensive reaction of many Liberals to this news. They so badly
need to believe that President Bush lied in order to legitimise
their hatred of him that they're capable of this sort of twisted
reasoning. The rationale seems to be that WMDs don't count if they
aren't exactly where the CIA told us they were, as if they
couldn't be moved.
D. The terrorists didn't even know it was a chemical shell.
Well, they do now. And they know where they found it, too.
We need to redouble our efforts to stop the terrorists and find
Saddam's WMDs, before they're used to derail the new Iraqi government's
formation. The media's refusal to give this news the coverage it deserves can
only be due to a calculated attempt to reduce American
support for our efforts in Iraq, including that of tracking
down Saddam's banned weapons. The Left's deliberate silence
on this subject for the purpose of influencing our election only
helps our enemies.