IJReview is reporting that the Weapons Of Mass Destruction we were told existed in Iraq have been found. What they are citing for this is a New York Times article which explains that American troops and Iraqi allies found roughly 5,000 chemical weapons in various forms, including a single depository of about 2,400 warheads, between 2004 and 2011. In six separate instances, American troops or allies were wounded by the weapons. IJReview goes on to state:
“Regardless of how one feels about George W. Bush or the Iraq War, this report definitely looks like ‘something of significance’ to those who were told there were no WMDs in Iraq – not to mention the soldiers who were injured by them.”
Yet Reason Magazine, MSNBC, and New York Magazine are reporting that those using the Times article as a way to exonerate the Bush Administration are getting it wrong. These were not products of the active, ongoing chemical weapons program that the Bush administration claimed existed and had to be stopped when it first made the case for war in Iraq. All the weapons were all more than a decade old by the time they were discovered. Most were made in the 1980s, and every single one of them had been created before 1991.
The Times goes on to explain why the orders to keep silent and keep the information from congress were most likely given:
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.
Unfortunately, for Bush Administration supporters this doesn’t look like the exoneration they were hoping for.
