Last weekend, I blew off this story because I thought it was too weak to take seriously. It turns out I blew it off for the wrong reason.
Initial reports indicated that Danish troops found mortal shells buried in Iraq which were believed, at least at first, to show trace amounts blister gas, a chemical weapon.
You could almost hear the ground moving from the conservative hawks jumping up and down in excitement.
But even these early reports weren’t terribly important or persuasive. The rounds appeared to be part of a missing stockpile from the war with Iran in the 1980s. We already knew Hussein was using WMD back then. Hell, the Reagan administration sent Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq to cozy up to Hussein anyway.
These were hardly the kind of weapons Bush talked about in the build up for last year’s invasion. They were old, leaking pipes that posed no risk to U.S. security. Even administration officials wisely downplayed the significance of the discovery.
Well, it turns out the whole debate about whether this was an important find was moot — the mortal shells didn’t have any chemical weapon agents.
Fox News, of all places, first began reporting yesterday that a 16-man team from the Iraqi Survey Group was sent to the scene to examine the mortar shells. Surprise, surprise, they were clean.
Of course, the testing isn’t complete and some of the shells are still being looked at, but it sounds like another false alarm on the WMD front.