On Tue, 13 Jan 2004 23:51:36 +0100, "Emmanuel Gustin"
wrote:

"Kevin Brooks" wrote in message
t...

that another 100 rounds may be in the cache. No doubt some folks will soon
be screaming that 36, or 136 for that matter, chemical rounds are not
indicitive of Saddam having had chemical munitions despite his
protestations
otherwise...

Always happy to oblige :-) Assuming these are indeed filled with a
blister agent, which still needs to be evaluated properly: Looking at
their condition, this hardly amounts to "having chemical ammunitions."
Surely the crime here is "having toxic waste". No remotely sane gun
crew is going to try to load and fire these rounds!

If this is your WMD standard, then I can tell Belgium must have a
larger WMD arsenal than Iraq: We have tons of leftovers from WW1,
in similar conditions. Farmers regularly unearth them while plowing
their fields. Usually they just drag them to the side and leave them
there until the collection truck comes round...


the question isn't "are they usable" but "when were they buried" if
it was during or after the Iranian conflict, it's very reasonable to
assume they were just forgotten, probably deliberately by whoever
might have had to try and dig them up.
If they were buried a year ago, that puts and entirely different
complex on things-- in that case, bush was right and Iraq DID have
combat ready munitions.

I've been told by some people that teh condition of the munitions
is not neccesarily a sign of how old they are-- it depends on how they
were buried the chemcical composition of the soil (!), and other
details, many of which, absent something convenient, like an
inspectors stamp with June 1st, 2003 on it, are fairly time
consuming-- and as one poster above said, there's always a chance that
they are not chemical munitions at all.