No, I'd argue just the opposite.
Two weeks ago one of our patrols found and disarmed an IED on the roadside. That IED was a jury-rigged artillery shell...and that particular artillery shell was filled with Mustard Gas, a blistering agent.
Blistering agents are *useless* against passing vehicle convoys, however. In the Great War, our troops could even stand extended exposure to German Mustard Gas by urinating on their shirt and then breathing through it...and that was for our boys trapped in the trenches inside large, stagnant pockets of the gas. Driving through a Mustard Gas detonation at ground level (rather than an airburst) is simply going to put a faint smell inside the cabin of HMMVW's.
So two weeks ago when our patrol found that Mustard Gas IED, I said that we would soon be seeing more IED's made from chemical munitions.
...And I said that because what is happening is that the nearly illiterate population of foreign insurgent fighters don't know the first thing about artillery munitions. They don't know what the chemical markings mean.
They know what an artillery shell looks like, and they've been told how to rig those shells to detonate as our patrols pass by, but they don't know what is inside those shells.
If they knew, then those chemical shells would be shipped by them at great profit to al-qaeda...but they aren't, and it is their decentralized cell structure that just about garauntees that their leadership doesn't know who has found the cache of chemical munitions.
Remember, Hussein stored *vast* caches of ammo all around Iraq. The insurgents are going to the remaining caches and raiding them for IED components.
So when we found the Mustard Gas artillery shell rigged as an IED, it was a no brainer that we'd soon see more chemical shells being used as IED's.
Not because they want to hit roadside convoys with chemical weapons, but because they are so uneducated that they don't realize that they aren't rigging up a high explosive artillery shell...as well as because that first Mustard gas IED indicates that the insurgents have found a cache of chemical munitions.
More will be found.
If they knew what they had come across in that chemical munitions cache, they'd all be wealthy from selling the weapons to al-qaeda...and al-qaeda would be using them to hit the Greek Olympics and various Western population centers.
That's where chemical munitions are useful, after all, against slow moving masses of civilians. You're wasting your time trying to use them against fast-moving patrols.
And worse (for the insurgents), you are justifying the whole war to even the President's harshest critics.
So where do we stand? In 1991 Hussein declared, in his surrender documents, some large quantities of anthrax, sarin, and mustard gas.
Over time, Hussein convinced UN weapons inspectors that Iraq had destroyed a fair amount of those chemical munitions...however, at least 550 chemical artillery shells were unaccounted for.
Now we've seen 2 of those chemical munitions in two weeks, used idiotically as roadside "bombs".
We'll see more, and we'll see them in the near future as the insurgents no doubt continue to raid this particular chemical munitions cache that they've found.