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Originally Posted by hannukah harry
1) chemical weapons are not WMD.
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Yes, they are.
Definition of WMD
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Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are weapons designed to kill large numbers of people, typically targeting civilians and military personnel alike. They are generally considered to have a psychological impact rather than a strictly military usefulness.
Though the phrase was coined in 1937 to describe aerial bombardment, the types of weapons today considered to be in this class are often referred to as NBC weapons or ABC weapons:
-nuclear weapons (including radiological weapons)
-biological weapons
-chemical weapons
They are also known as weapons of indiscriminate destruction, weapons of mass disruption and weapons of catastrophic effect.
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History
As early as 1000 BCE the Chinese employed arsenical smoke in warfare. During the Peloponnesian War Spartans used noxious smoke against Athenian cities.
A New York school teacher, John Doughty, proposed the use of chlorine gas as a weapon in the American Civil War. Although it is widely speculated that the weapon was never used, poison gas claimed at least one causualty in the Civil War. John Sitzler, a drummer boy in the Union Army, was injured by chlorine gas. He died sometime after 1893 of lung damage from the gas. His wife, Emelia Pauline Langner Sitzler, was paid a United States Army pension as the widow of a casualty until her death.
The first major use of chemical warfare agents was during World War I, with the use of various agents including chlorine, mustard gas, and phosgene gas. They were not extensively used during World War II due to the fear of retaliation and because chemical weapons are of limited use in a mobile front in which their use would slow the advance of one's own troops. In addition chemical warfare requires supply from railroads which was available in the fixed fronts of World War I, but not the mobile fronts of World War II.
The Nazis used the chemical weapon Zyklon B, a derivative of hydrogen cyanide, to kill Jews and other victims in gas chambers in extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Majdanek: see Holocaust.
In 1944 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, launched a chemical warfare assault on the Jewish community in Palestine; e-Husseini was the Islamic religious authority of the Palestinian Arabs, and allied with Adolf Hitler. Five parachutists were sent with a toxin to spread into the water system of the Jewish community. While the parachutists were caught, the amount of toxin they had was estimated sufficient to kill 25,000 people.
Chemical weapons were also extensively used by both sides during the Iran-Iraq War and are additionally believed to have been used by Iraq against Kurdish civilian populations. The Iraqi weapons were supplied by western governments hoping to contain the Iranian revolution.
The use of chemical weapons is generally abhorred in international law, and there are many rules to discourage or make difficult their acquisition and use. Of these the most important is the Chemical Weapons Convention.
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2) his having chemical weapons in the 80's weren't the basis for the war. the basis was that he had be rebuilding his weapons programs since the gulf war, which has been proven to be false.
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It has been claimed that he stopped producing WMD because he wanted to get UN sanctions lifted. It has been further claimed that he would have revived those programs the moment sanctions were lifted. There is confirmation in the Duelfer Report of a top-secret 'poisons program' developed by Hussein out of his WMD program that was used to assasinate his rivals and political enemies. Gotta put some of that juice to good use, at least while the whole world is watching for WMD.
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so basically, you're saying that you don't care about why we went to war, you just like us being at war. cause the reasons don't seem to matter to you. i guess being blindly partisan is nice and comforting... makes you all warm and fuzzy inside...
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If your accusing me of not being a pacifist, then yes you are correct. 9/11 changed everything about terrorism, the potential damage caused by terrorists, hiding terrorists, and supporting terrorists. I believe the reaction was an appropriate one: to prove Bin Laden & Co. dead wrong that America is not, in fact, a hedonistic paper tiger that could be brought down by one simple massive strike.