If the sad chapter of the US’ illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not bad enough, a special investigation by the New York Times into Washington’s handling of Saddam Hussain’s disparate chemical weaponry adds a further pitiful tone to this entire miscalculated and misguided mission.
According to New York Times, US soldiers regularly came into contact with shells and rockets that contained various chemical weapons and nerve agents. And those soldiers were ill-equipped to deal with those weapons, causing a range of illnesses and injuries to the troops. To add insult to injury, the contacts with the chemical arsenal were treated as top secret, meaning the soldiers had no recourse and little sympathy for their resultant long-term illnesses. While that is bad enough, the US, in its haste to maintain secrecy, exposed ill-equipped and poorly trained Iraqi forces to the weaponry.
If this comedy of errors ended there, the chapter would have been horrific. But because of the chaos on the ground that resulted from the illegal invasion, and the fact that there were no contingency plans in place to form an effective civilian administration in Baghdad, the stockpiles of weaponry are now in territory that is controlled by Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Saddam had acquired his arsenal with the tacit support of the US and other western powers, who were all eager to help him remain in power as he took on Iran. These western nations managed to skirt international conventions on chemical weapons. The US complicity in this scheme has, in effect, come back to haunt Washington.
As its excuse for invading Iraq, the administration of president George W. Bush insisted that Saddam had developed a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and he was prepared to use them. Sadly, as the world now knows, that was not the case. What Saddam had was a series of shells and rockets filled with nerve agents — materials supplied to him by the West. And it is a portion of these very shells that are now missing in Daesh territory.
