Saddam gassed the Kurds. We know he had WMD.
And, he never proved that he had gotten rid of them. (Is that grammatically correct?)
Yeah, and to get out with any self-respect intact, we're going to have to do something similar. Not gas, of course. But massively devastating.
Saddam DID have a point--it's tough to pacify this triad of fanatics who inhabit the geographic/political construct we call Iraq.
Excellent point. Saddam's gassing of the Iranians and the Kurds' in the 80s go down the Orwellian memory hole. My response to the Dueffler report is a simple one: If Saddam had NO WMDs, why did he violate 16 years of UN resolutions and block the work of the inspectors at every stage? That's not the behavior of someone who's innocent. The British said he was acquiring uranium from Africa. All of this is ignored by the report as well as the fact every intelligence agency on the planet agreed about Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Re-writing history doesn't change the reality that we faced.
He had some old artillery shells filled with mustard gas and nerve gas. They were depleted and/or destroyed by 1991.
The Kurds were killed by drift from a nearby Iran-Iraq battle. Based on the autopsies, the gas appears to have been from the Iranian side.
NBC weapons are expensive, ultimately not very effective in light of their equal risk of harm to the deploying army, and require arcane technical skills to manufacture, store, and transport. The comically inept Iraqi military did not have those resources.