"Some were degraded, some not..."
Right... so maybe some still had military utility, while some not.... (I think a more useful question to answer might be: *when* were they manufactured? 'Iran/Iraq War - Reagan/Bush' era? Later? Pre-Desert Storm?, etc.)
"if they're harmless, would you mind storing them in your garage?"
LOL, I don't recall ever saying that anything was 'harmless'. Hell, I wouldn't want to store paint in my garage....
Still... I don't see what all the 'FOX' hububb is about. 'Round the time of the war resolution passing, the 'conventional wisdom' (supposedly held by most 'people in the know') was that Saddam fielded an ample assortment of 'WMD', and had numerous development programs (nuclear, missile, chemical, ... even 'unmanned aircraft' programs) running full-tilt in the background. The world had actually *seen* his field use of gas against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard 'human wave attacks', and in gassing two Kurdish villages that later revolted.
Wasn't until we toppled Saddam and the inspectors (US and UN) got the roam of the place that they were able to report that the vast majority of his WMD production capability had been bombed to smithereens in Desert Storm, and subsequently the program remanants had been financially strangled by the 10 years of financial sanctions and embargoes that followed Desert Storm (&, I suppose, by the Dictator's decision to emphasize palace construction over actual weapons build-ups. :-), and by periodic bombings....
Who the Hell actually needs expensive programs, as long as everyone already BELIEVES you are 'packin'? You get the 'street cred' and the regional influence on the cheap that way. <G>
I'm not sure how one moves from saying that 'everyone knew he had LOTS of WMD' to claiming that 'lots of people said he didn't have ANY'? (I don't recall *anyone* who ever said that....) |
