Thanks. On the other hand, I failed to point out a contra argument which is perhaps equally plausible -- it goes along with the "Saddam's scientists/military guys were fooling him" hypothesis. The idea here is that the scientists Saddam thought he had tasked to make CW, for whatever reason were scared to, couldn't, were skimming money, didn't have enough funds to do so cuz Saddam used all his money for palaces, (or whatever), so they ginned up some (honest to goodness) mostly pesticide-like stuff which would pass muster by coming up positive on whatever (crude) tests that Saddam's Chemical-weapons-verifier would use to report back to Saddam that "they're making great progress".
I hasten to add that even under that hypothesis, it remains true that Saddam had a secret CW program and was hiding it from the UN. It just would mean that the CW program was incompetent, insubordinate, and/or corrupt :)
Of course, now that our military has confirmed that this stuff really is sarin, it seems that perhaps this Saddam-got-fooled explanation was not true in *all* cases anyway... best,
Right.
I just wonder if this binary artillery shell, who's manufacture is rather sophisticated, isn't in fact a relic from the era when Sadam had a relatively unrestricted WMD program.