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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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"Iraq didn't have WMDs, and neither does Iran" is one of those "big lies" that your civics teacher should have warned you about.

Saddam Hussein's Regime had extensive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and expended a fair bit of effort to maintain at least the appearance of a limited nuclear capability (remember "dirty bombs"?). Furthermore, they actually deployed some of those chemical and biological weapons in the early phases of the invasion only for it to backfire badly on them because coalition forces were universally issued protective equipment while Iraqi soldiers and civilians were not.

Finally, while Iran may not currently have nuclear weapons, preventing them from getting them is fundamentally what this current conflict is all about. Both the US and the Saudis have ample geopolitical reasons for wanting to maintain the norm of "non-proliferation", while Israel and the UAE (quite reasonably in my opinion) regard the prospect of a nuclear-armed IRGC as an existential threat.

Furthermore, they actually deployed some of those chemical and biological weapons in the early phases of the invasion

Do you have a link for this? I'm not familiar with the claim.

They had old moldy stockpiles of chemical weapons that were in disuse. None were actually used in the 2003 invasion and the only effect was that some US soldiers ended up poisoning themselves when disposing of them because they weren't properly labeled. The old canard was that Rumsfeld knew about Iraq's WMDs because he still had his receipts from Iran-Iraq.

All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.

In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.

Participants in the chemical weapons discoveries said the United States suppressed knowledge of finds for multiple reasons, including that the government bristled at further acknowledgment it had been wrong. “They needed something to say that after Sept. 11 Saddam used chemical rounds,” Mr. Lampier said. “And all of this was from the pre-1991 era.”

Others pointed to another embarrassment. In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.

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