Destroying them safely is a difficult and expensive process. VX in particular, has to be incinerated at high temperatures to destroy toxic byproducts, and if the temperature isn't high enough what escapes the chimney is very nasty - a farmer near Dugway Proving Grounds (IIRC) found a flock of sheep keeled over mysteriously dead one time.
Chemical weapons produced at the Al Muthanna facility, which Isis today seized, are believed to have included mustard gas, Sarin, Tabun, and VX.
A blistering agent and three nerve gases. Now, in order for anyone to get money to destroy the stuff they'd first have to admit publicly that it existed, wouldn't they? And that goes against the Left's media narrative. So there it sat.
It has been a decade of screaming frustration having to endure the constant drumbeat of "Bush lied, people died" that is still a propaganda staple. Of course Saddam had the stuff, he killed people with it. It is simply amazing how much amnesia suddenly occurred when it became advantageous for the Left to pretend otherwise.
So what we have here is an admission that Saddam really did have these weapons, that everybody knew it, and that the propaganda campaign went on regardless. It ought to be a major embarrassment, but unless somebody dies, it will be a minor ripple, quickly forgotten.
“It has been a decade of screaming frustration having to endure the constant drumbeat of “Bush lied, people died” that is still a propaganda staple.”
Of course, the problem is that the most believable propagandist is President Bush himself, who has said on several occasions that our failure to find WMDs in Iraq is one of the biggest disappointments of his presidency. In November of 2010 he addressed this failure in his memoir, Decision Points. In discussing the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush notes, “That was a massive blow to our credibility—my credibility—that would shake the confidence of the American people.” He then adds: “No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.”
Interview The Times, November 10, 2010
64-year-old Bush told ‘The Times’ newspaper among his regrets were “flying a Mission Accomplished banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003, the premature reduction of US troop numbers in Iraq after the invasion and, above all, the inaccurate information on WMD.”
He said: “The reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false.”
The Telegraph article is not the magic bullet to prove the existence of WMDs. The article itself says that WMDs were once made there. It does not say there are any WMDs there at present, or were there at the start of the Iraq war:
““17.09 Chemical weapons produced at the Al Muthanna facility, which Isis today seized, are believed to have included mustard gas, Sarin, Tabun, and VX.”
The article goes on to say, “17.05 The Chemical Weapons Convention, which Iraq joined in 2009, requires it to dispose of the material at Al Muthanna, even though it was declared unusable and “does not pose a significant security risk”
If the above is true, then I can see why Al Muthanna has not been cited before as proof of WMDs.