Doug Miller wrote:


Talk about living in your own little world... you continue to ignore
the FACT
that there is NO evidence that Iraq actually destroyed all its
chem/bio
weapons. The Duelfer report concludes that they were destroyed "in
secret".
This conclusion is on its face unsupported, and unsupportable: if it
happened
in secret, how do we know it happened at all?

The fact is that with the exception of mustard, all of Iraq's
chemical weapons had a short shelf life due to impurities.
The Iraqi manufacturing facilites and stockpiles were bombed
during the 1991 war. UNSCOM proceeded to destroy most of the
remaining facilites (see below as to the fate of the rest).

Even during the period of the UNSCOM inspections Iraq continued
some banned work developing and later destroying VX. Residues
obtained by UNMOVIC at the disposal site confirmed that VX had
been bestroyed there though the quantitiy destroyed was in-
determinate. But again, Iraq never achieved the purity needed
for long-term storage.

In 1998 Iraq balked and refused to allow inspection of a facility
so Clinton bombed it. UNSCOM voluntarily left Iraq shortly befor
the bombing and was refused readmittance thereafter. This led
to concerns that Iraq was rebuilding it's WMD facilites and
arsenal.

However, the claim by the Bush administration that these facilites
had been rebuilt after 1998 was disproven when UNMOVIC inspected
them in 2002 and 2003 and found that they were still destroyed.

As David Kay said, no factories, no weapons.

UNSCOM and UNMOVIC concluded that about 550 mustard munitions
left over from befor the 1991 war remained unaccounted for.
This is too small a quantity to be of effective tactical use
and is small enough to be the result of poor record keeping
during the heat of battle.

No other munitions manufactured by Iraq were of sufficient
purity to maintain their effectiveness over a period of years.
Do you understand that? If Sadam Hussein was hiding a
stockpile of pre-1991 WMD from UNSCOM and UNMOVIC for all
those years as you have oft contended, he was hiding a
stockpile of duds.


The UN required that they be destroyed under UN supervision,
in order that the
whole world would KNOW that they had been destroyed.
That did not happen, and
thus it is NOT known what became of them.

UNSCOM reported the destruction under UNSCOM supervision of
substantial stockpiles during 1991-1993, as well as the supervised
destruction of the manufacturing facilites. Clearly the 1998
destruction accomplished in Operation Desert Fox was unsupervised.

In 2002 Iraq declared that it had unilterally destroyed some
small quantities like the VX discussed above. I quite agree
that in the period from 1991 to 2002 Iraq under Sadam Hussein
commited numerous violations of the UN sanctions. I do not
agree that punishing Sadam Hussein is worth the loss of a
single American life.

Do you agree that the UN and Bush, in the Fall of 2002 gave Iraq
a last chance to comply?



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FF