Weapons, Weapons, Everywhere...

...But none to pin a war on.

First, there's a great bit of proper journalism in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune yesterday, as reporter Susan Taylor Martin examines some of the evidence from recent US military briefings about alleged Iranian weapons in Iraq. It's a reminder that the mainstream still has advantages on certain kinds of story that blogs simply cannot match, resources and contacts that can open up avenues unavailable to bloggers. If the Minn. Star-Trib can dig up this information, imagine what the WaPo or NYT could do if they weren't stuck in stenography mode.

In a series of briefings this month, the U.S. military has displayed mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and a particularly lethal type of roadside bomb made in Iran. The military has acknowledged there is no direct evidence the Iranian leadership is responsible.

But skepticism abounds about the origin of the weapons, with critics wondering why those alleged to have been made in Iran had markings in English, not Farsi. And Monday, the New York Times printed a letter from an Iranian who said dates on some of the weapons -- including one dated 5-31-2006 -- prove the claims are "preposterous."The dates are in the American date format -- month first, day second -- whereas the rest of the world does not use this format," wrote M.A. Mohammadi of Iran's U.N. mission. Iran and most other countries put the day first, followed by month and year.

Yet photos on the DIO website [Iran's arms company - C] suggest Iran does use English lettering on at least some weapons in accord with international standards. However, none of the weapons shown on the company's site appears to be dated.

There are also visible differences between 81-millimeter mortar shells known to be made by Iran and those displayed Feb. 11 by the U.S. military in Baghdad. The Iranian mortar shell has four horizontal ribs below the lettering and no date; the one shown in Baghdad has three ribs above the lettering and the date 3-2006.

Indeed, as skeptics have pointed out, the shell displayed in Baghdad looks more like a munition that was made in Iraq around the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. After the 2003 invasion, coalition troops found caches of munitions throughout Iraq but failed to secure many of them. Tons of weapons fell into insurgent hands.

Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Iraq at one time would have been able to manufacture many of the types of weapons now being seized by U.S. forces.

"Truth is, any really good machine shop with automated metal lathes and normal tools could make them," Cordesman said.

Iran began developing its weapons industry during its 1980-88 war with Iraq, when the United States and other Western countries supported Saddam Hussein's secular regime and slapped an arms embargo on Iran's Islamic government.

"They [Iran] got really tight with countries like China and North Korea to make sure they had a domestic arms industry that would to the fullest extent possible make them an independent player," Pike said. "They're quite energetic and they're open for business."

Which means that the Iranian arms industry, like many another nation (The UK exported $13 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia alone last year, the US exported $10 billion to the same country), is open for business.

What does that mean for claims of Iranian complicity?

"Nigeria is as crooked as the day is long, so if Nigeria bought arms from Iran, no telling where they are going to show up," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. "And if Iran is supplying arms to Hezbollah, no telling where those are going to show up, either."

It means resale is a booming business too and some nations are using it as a fast means of making hard cash - so weaponry from just about any nation can quickly turn up anywhere else nowadays, via a third party and with national leaders none the wiser. No justification for belligerence there.

So how about a do-over? [See edit below]

Fox News has a breathless report of what they describe as a "quickly called" press conference at which Republican senators Rick Santorum and Pete Hoekstra announced "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons."

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

"The purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal," Santorum read from the document.

"This says weapons have been discovered, more weapons exist and they state that Iraq was not a WMD-free zone, that there are continuing threats from the materials that are or may still be in Iraq," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Breathless stuff, holding out the hope that the first justification for a war of aggression against Iraq and the bloody quagmire which the occupation became was always the alleged threat of Saddam's WMD arsenal. (That was before the White House started spinning the story. Does anyone actually remember how many different "justifications" they've used now?)

Fox News writes that the finds "show that Saddam Hussein was lying when he said all weapons had been destroyed, and it shows that years of on-again, off-again weapons inspections did not uncover these munitions." Are the neocons now vindicated?

Well, no.

Burying chemical weapons in the desert is tantamount to destroying them as weapons. Without climate controlled storage, the compounds involved quickly break down into toxic products that are still dangerous - to those handling them or living nearby - but are useless as weaponry. Saddam was, as we knew even then, short of cash and not exactly concentrating on environmentally-friendly policies. It would be far cheaper for him, right after Gulf War I, to just to bury his chemical weapons and foregt about them. He wouldn't have gone to all the trouble the US military does with secure storage tanks and expensive special incinerators.

Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

"This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991," the official said, adding the munitions "are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war."

If these things had been buried in the desert for more than a year or so, they were effectively unweaponized, destroyed as weapons. They had been buried far longer than that. They were not in any way useful, not even to reconstitute a WMD program if inspectors stopped paying attention. Got that Mr. Santorum? Rick?

"This is an incredibly — in my mind — significant finding. The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction, is in fact false."

Oh, good grief! [EDIT: it took Nell in comments to point out the obvious - this story is months old. It appeared on the aggregators as new this morning for some reason and, not being fully ceffeinated, i didn't check the dateline. My bad. I apologize. Still - a useful reminder of how the uber-right hates saying it was wrong, ever,]

Update Although the MSM has resources unavailable to bloggers, it's sometimes possible to find stuff people aren't already pointing to. I am indebted to regular reader Rudi, who went digging and found this at John Pike's GlobalSecurity.Org:

Shaped Charges in the Oil Industry

The most extensive use today of Shaped Charges is in the oil and gas industry, where they open up the rock around drilled wells. Shaped charges are used in the oil and gas industry and in other fields to pierce metal, concrete, and other solid materials. In an oil or gas well, a metallic casing is cemented to the borehole walls to maintain the borehole integrity. Shaped charges are incorporated in a hollow carrier gun or a strip positioned in the casing. The shaped charges are activated to pierce the well casing and the geologic formation at the hydrocarbon producing zone. The hydrocarbons enter the casing through such perforations and are transmitted to the well surface.

Doesn't Iraq have something to do with the oil industry? And isn't that industry mostly concentrated in the South, a predominantly Shiite area? And isn't it the Shiite militias that the US military are having so much trouble with because they use EFP's? Those are pretty easy dots to connect.

Now a shaped charge improvised explosive device is not, quite, an explosively formed projectile device. But it is it's close kin in practical terms. Just add the liner to be deformed by the charge. Rudi, in his email, said "It seems absurd that in the oil rich ME only Iran would take the civial use of EFP and apply it to military use. Any high level oil employee, working in drilling, would have experience in the use and (maybe) manufacturing of EFP's. Extending this out, a Saudis drilling techician or engineer could be a source of EFP's in Iraq."

Update 2 Yet more fixing the facts around the policy - now, after months and years of talking up the threat, Bush administration officials are admitting they may have been wrong about North Korea's uranium enrichment program. Over to Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings:

Let's be very clear about what this means. We used to have a deal, the Agreed Framework, that kept North Korea from getting plutonium. We supposedly discovered that they were cheating on that deal by enriching uranium. Personally, I did not think that was a good reason to scrap the Agreed Framework -- making a uranium bomb takes a lot longer than making a plutonium bomb, and I didn't see why the discovery that North Korea had embarked on a slow, cumbersome process of developing nuclear weapons, one that wouldn't actually produce any weapons for years, was a reason to say: well, go ahead and develop nuclear weapons much more quickly, then!

All this time, though, I was assuming that the North Koreans actually had a uranium enrichment program, and that they actually were cheating on the Agreed Framework. That's what this article calls into question.

If they didn't have a uranium program, then we scrapped the Agreed Framework, and let North Korea access its plutonium and build nuclear weapons, FOR NOTHING.

...Every time I think that nothing this administration can do could possibly surprise me, I turn out to be wrong.