Posted on 09/11/2013 8:49:27 AM PDT by mojito
If Saddam Hussein's Iraq is anything to go by, destroying Syria's massive chemical weapons arsenal will mean checking dozens of far-flung sites in a war zone while the government employs delaying tactics to hide the banned munitions, an expert involved in past U.N. disarmament missions said.
Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons network comprises remote underground bunkers where hundreds of tons of nerve agents are stored, scud missiles and artillery shells, possibly armed with cyanide, and factories deep inside hostile territory used to produce mustard or VX gas, experts believe.
"It's big. He has one of the biggest chemical weapons programs in the region and even in the world," said Dieter Rothbacher, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq who trained members of the team that just returned from Syria.
"There are calculations that to secure them up to 75,000 ground troops are needed," he said in a Reuters interview. "It took us three years to destroy that stuff under U.N. supervision in Iraq."
First there needs to be an iron-clad agreement, either by Syria joining the Chemical Weapons Convention, but more likely in the form of a U.N. Security Council agreement, in which Damascus relinquishes control of the weapons.
[....]
The Syrian chemical weapons program, set up in the 1970s, reportedly with assistance from Iran and Russia and supplies of raw chemicals from Western companies, was designed to counter Israel.
Its stockpile is believed by Western intelligence to be spread over dozens of sites and includes research and development centers and multiple production sites, some of them underground.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
How come it takes years to destroy something which was received from Iraq in a matter of days?
The US has an island, Mid-pacific, that was has facilities to do that quickly.
I think he was referring to the chemical weapons destroyed after the first Gulf War.
Johnston Island has been closed for over 15 years.
1. There's a war going on.
2. It is getting destroyed onsite.
3. It isn't just the stuff from Iraq, Syria has been producing for decades.
Yeah....wasn't it just yesterday or the day before we found out Britain and/or France sold them the chems to make some of it?
Last time I was there on the way to Kwaj (IIRC in the early 90s it was active)....landed there and refueled....
Yep, Britian.
You asked a question, I answered in the affirmative. What is your real question? Do you doubt Syria has been making CW for years?
Actually, it only closed in 2004. We’ve other sites destroying chemical munitions today.
Syria’s been making chemical weapons for years, and there is a very good possibility that some of Saddam’s chemical weapons went there.
I don't think there should be any doubt about that.
I didn’t get to Iraq until 2005, so I’m not as sure what Saddam might have moved before the war.
Then you know he didn't get all of them out of there. He had alot of things to move as soon as he figured the US was serious about getting rid of him.
Yep.
No, worse...
1) Iraq had chemical weapons
2) UN inspectors inventoried and tagged specific lots of chemical weapons for destruction
3) In 1998, Iraq kicked out the inspectors before all inventoried stockpiles were destroyed
4) Operation Desert Fox bombs a few sites with no boots on the ground to confirm destruction of anything
5) UN inspectors return to Iraq in 2002
6) UN inspectors ask about the disposition of the previously tagged stockpiles. The answers range from:
a) They were destroyed in Operation Desert Fox
b) We buried them in the desert, but we don’t know where
c) We have no record of that
7) The US invades and can’t find the previously tagged stockpiles either (because they were moved to Syria, but I digress)
8) The MSM gleefully reports that since the weapons weren’t found, Iraq never had chemical weapons in the first place. That is, Bush lied. All this despite the FACTS outlined above.
Don’t expect facts to get in the way of a liberal media trashing a conservative.
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