Sarin Gas in Roadside Bomb?

Sachin · May 17, 2004

Reuters reports CENTCOM assessing reports of sarin gas found in roadside bomb:

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=politicsNews&storyID=5167022

U.K.'s Guardian has more detail:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1218878,00.html

Sachin

superdave · May 22, 2004

Was it a dud from the Iran-Iraq war?

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_05/003979.php

Was that sarin shell we discovered a few days ago part of a secret WMD stash, or was it just a miscellaneous dud that was fired years ago and then left to rust in the desert? Scott Ritter says it's pretty easy to find out:

(snip)

NOTE: This is Ritter-Given what's known about sarin shells, the US could be expected to offer a careful recital of the data with news of the shell. But facts that should have accompanied the story — the type of shell, its condition, whether it had been fired previously, and the age and viability of the sarin and precursor chemicals — were absent. And that's opened the door to irresponsible speculation that the shell was part of a live WMD stockpile.
Click to expand...

I know y'all all hate Scott Ritter...but what he wrote is obviously correct. It should be pretty easy to figure out whether this was a fired or unfired Sarin shell. Rummy & co. didn't tout the shell, nor did they release the information that would help outside experts determine if it had ever been fired. I agree with Kevin Drum here...a very likely possibility is that this thing was a dud the insurgents found in the middle of nowhere somewhere. That would also explain why they set it off in such an unproductive place (because they didn't know it was a sarin shell, because it seemed like just a random dud), and it would explain why there's just one so far (if it had been part of a stockpile, even a tiny one, it would be pretty weird for the bad guys to have set off only the one.)

Anyone have a better explanation? Otherwise, I consider this useless as a justification for the war.