Replies

I think his question is legitimate despite his apparent political motivations.

The answer is that chemical rounds have a relatively small bursting charge meant to open the casing, the U.S. version blows off the base plate, and let the chemicals disperse over as wide an area as possible. As such, they leave behind large pieces of metal. The origin of the shell and its contents can be determined from the information markings on the recovered fragments. Let's wait and see where the round originated.

The reasons why I believe it originated in Iraq are manifold. However, the first is what foreign country would risk interception during transportation or identification after use?

The second is that if this attack was planned and executed by people with enough juice to get chemical weapons from a foreign government, then we are fighting against incompetents since the target of the attack was not nearly as valuable as the weapon used, and I don't think we a fighting incompetents. It is more likely this was an unintended use of chemicals by individuals unaware of what they were using.

There are more reasons, but I think these two are sufficient to doubt that the chemical weapons came from outside Iraq.

Poodlebrain said: "I don't think we a fighting incompetents. "

I disagree. Saddam lives in a cell and eats only what we provide. If this was his intention, then that is a strange strategy.

Sadr lives, I believe, because political concerns have slowed our response and weakened our resolve to eliminate those opposed to us.

One possible explanation for what happened is that there is a splintering of opposition power in Iraq and some of the groups, badly managed and led, have decided to use such weapons to create a panic on our side.

Poisonous gases are very difficult to use effectively as anything other than a weapon of terror. In WWI, allied troops were cooped up in fixed entrenchments and made themselves targets. My guess is that the Iraqi terrorists are unable to deploy these agents any more effectively than we are seeing.

I don't know the condition of the thousands in Japan who were injured by the sarin attack, but there were only a dozen killed. This is much smaller than the explosions accomplished in Spain with a similar setting.

So if we combine this artillery shell with the illegal longe range delivery systems that were found last year, we basically have a missile with Sarin that could potentially hit Tel Aviv.

If Iraq produced Sarin I would be willing to bet that they could fit it on one of those missiles.