“...then again we had evidence of WMDs in Iraq.”
And they were there and I seriously doubt we got them all. But Russia first:
The Soviet Union covertly operated the world’s largest, longest, and most sophisticated biological weapons program, thereby violating its obligations as a party to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The program began in the 1920s and lasted until at least September 1992 but has possibly been continued by Russia after that.
The Chimera Project attempted in the late 1980s and early 1990s to combine DNA from Venezuelan equine encephalitis and smallpox at Obolensk, and Ebola virus and smallpox at Vector. The existence of these chimeric viruses programmes was one reason why Kanatzhan Alibeck defected to the United States in 1992. Journal articles by scientists suggest that in 1999 the experiments were still being continued.
The Soviet Union reportedly had a large biological weapons program enhancing the usefulness of the Marburg virus. The development was conducted in Vector Institute under the leadership of Dr. Ustinov who was accidentally killed by the virus. The samples of Marburg taken from Ustinov’s organs were more powerful than the original strain. The new strain, called “Variant U”, had been successfully weaponized and approved by the Soviet Ministry of Defense in 1990. The State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR, also known as the Vector Institute, is a biological research center in Koltsovo, Novosibirsk Oblast, Russia. It has research facilities and capabilities for all levels of Biological Hazard, CDC Levels 1–4. It is one of two official repositories for the now-eradicated smallpox virus, and was part of the system of laboratories known as the Biopreparat. Where there’s smoke...
And this is the documented stuff. There’s a lot more and everyone is playing the game. These things don’t go away. You can find almost every type of bug in test tubes around the world that ever existed...stored and ready to duplicate, in a plothera of countries.
An example is the bubonic plague. It was first loose in the 1300’s and killed thousands in Europe. It still has an outbreak in the northwest US every year.
As for Iraq, we went over there and tried to finish the job the UN started. And if UNSCOM, and later UNMOVIC, had been allowed by either Saddam or the United States to proceed with their work unhindered in 1998 and 2003, their plans called for devoting the greatest attention and monitoring the most sites in the biological weapons sector. It is also true that Iraq’s failure to produce specific and authoritative documentation did not permit either UNSCOM, or later UNMOVIC, formally to confirm that Baghdad had indeed destroyed the weapons they possessed. Between 1981 and 1991, Iraq produced over 3,857 tons of CW agents. A lot of that is still undocumented thus unaccounted for. So where did it go. If it wasn’t there, it wouldn’t have to be missing and there would be no proven doctored documentation.
wy69
We know for a fact that pre-1991 weapons did exist and we found some and some were used be terrorists. But the claims that Iraq had an ongoing weapons program didn’t pan out.
Stories came out that much of their military budget was simply pilfered through corruption. Either way the UK and US didn’t look so good after going to war over our claims.
We almost got John Kerry as POTUS out of it.