We Arm 'Em So We Can Fight 'Em, Part Whatever

The United States [went] to war [in Iraq] declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.

The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve [Sarin] or mustard agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official count was classified.

  NYT

Slightly higher in government speak.

The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors.

[...]

“I felt more like a guinea pig than a wounded soldier,” said a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard burns in 2007 and was denied hospital treatment and medical evacuation to the United States despite requests from his commander.

Congress, too, was only partly informed, while troops and officers were instructed to be silent or give deceptive accounts of what they had found.

Very interesting when you know the flack the administration took for not finding those WMDs. Even though these were not part of an active weapons program, and only evidence of the old, abandoned and unusable program, and many were rusted, rupturing to disperse the chemical agents only over the immediate area, the fact that they existed at all would surely have been touted as supporting their claims, unless something about them was worse than their use for propaganda. The largest cache found included more than 2,400 nerve-agent rockets.

Jarrod L. Taylor, a former Army sergeant on hand for the destruction of mustard shells that burned two soldiers in his infantry company, joked of “wounds that never happened” from “that stuff that didn’t exist.” The public, he said, was misled for a decade. “I love it when I hear, ‘Oh there weren’t any chemical weapons in Iraq,’ ” he said. “There were plenty.”

[...]

Rear Adm. John Kirby, spokesman for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, declined to address specific incidents detailed in the Times investigation, or to discuss the medical care and denial of medals for troops who were exposed. But he said that the military’s health care system and awards practices were under review, and that Mr. Hagel expected the services to address any shortcomings.

Only now that it’s been found out by investigative reporters.  I'm going to have to guess that for the reporters to even be going after this story at this point, there must have been a leaker.

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.

[...]

[T]he Iraqi government said that about 2,500 corroded chemical rockets remained on the grounds, and that Iraqi officials had witnessed intruders looting equipment before militants shut down the surveillance cameras.

Swell.

The United States government says the abandoned weapons no longer pose a threat.

Of course they don’t.

But, the question remains: Why did the government keep these finds a secret?

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.

That seems a little unlikely, if possible. They were already taking a beating, and they could have pointed out that “the bad guys” could get hold of these stores and convert them into something usable.

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.

Now THAT I’ll buy. That’s more than an embarrassment. That’s proof that we’re in a totally effed up cycle that is destroying the world via our insane “defense” industry.  And call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there was something sinister in the deal.  At the very least, we once supplied Mr. Hussein.

According to [the Convention on Chemical Weapons], chemical weapons must be secured, reported and destroyed in an exacting and time-consuming fashion.

The Pentagon did not follow the steps, but says that it adhered to the convention’s spirit.

Psssh. We definitely don’t have to follow any laws, treaties or conventions. That should be obvious by now. Why even bother to pretend any more?

“These suspect weapons were recovered under circumstances in which prompt destruction was dictated by the need to ensure that the chemical weapons could not threaten the Iraqi people, neighboring states, coalition forces, or the environment,” said Jennifer Elzea, a Pentagon spokeswoman.

Seriously Jen? You people just told us a few paragraphs back that it didn’t matter they weren’t reported because they were harmless.

The convention, she added, “did not envisage the conditions found in Iraq.”

So we can just decide to do something else off the cuff. No need to work out a new convention. That’s why Saddam Hussein set up his chemical weapons program against Iran a few decades earlier. He was responding to the conditions he found - conditions which were not envisaged in earlier times.

In 2004, a report from a group led by a former UN official working for the CIA, Charles A Duelfer, “acknowledged that the American military had found old chemical ordnance.”

The report [...] played down the dangers of the lingering weapons, stating that because their contents would have deteriorated, “any remaining chemical munitions in Iraq do not pose a militarily significant threat.”

[...]

Reached recently, Mr. Duelfer agreed that the weapons were still a menace, but said the report strove to make it clear that they were not “a secret cache of weapons of mass destruction.”

“What I was trying to convey is that these were not militarily significant because they [were] not used as W.M.D.,” he said. “It wasn’t that they weren’t dangerous.”

You just misunderstood his report.

And finally, another reason these agents did not get reported…

In the difficult calculus of war, competing missions had created tensions. If documenting chemical weapons delayed the destruction of explosive weapons that were killing people each week, or left troops vulnerable while waiting for chemical warfare specialists to arrive, then reporting chemical weapons endangered lives.

Many techs said the teams chose common sense. “I could wait all day for tech escort to show up and make a chem round disappear, or I could just make it disappear myself,” another tech said.

The NYT article is quite lengthy. It’s titled “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons” and contains details about cases of troop exposure and the way the military dealt – or didn’t deal – with them. Read the whole thing for these shameful stories.

“We’re at the point of wanting to make this right,” Col. Bill Rice, director of Occupational and Environmental Medicine of the Army Public Health Command said last Friday.

Isn't that nice.  What took you so long?

As for the weapons…

Finding, safeguarding and destroying these weapons was to be the responsibility of Iraq’s government.

Iraq took initial steps to fulfill its obligations. It drafted a plan to entomb the contaminated bunkers on Al Muthanna, which still held remnant chemical stocks, in concrete.

When three journalists from The Times visited Al Muthanna in 2013, a knot of Iraqi police officers and soldiers guarded the entrance. Two contaminated bunkers — one containing cyanide precursors and old sarin rockets — loomed behind. The area where Marines had found mustard shells in 2008 was out of sight, shielded by scrub and shimmering heat.

The Iraqi troops who stood at that entrance are no longer there. The compound, never entombed, is now controlled by the Islamic State.