Juan Cole says chemical weapons are not really WMD

Juan Cole

Wow, I have heard some convoluted reasoning around the old blogosphere, but this is a new level of “irrationalization” (just made that up. Like it? )

Seems Juan has asked his sycophants to explain to the right-wingers how chemical weapons are not really WMD but instead are properly categorized as battlefield weapons.

I don’t know much about Juan, but perhaps he should stick to his field of expertise and this ain’t it:

To start, one of the odd little arrows in the quiver of my critics is that I said that chemical weapons are more properly characterized as battlefield weapons than as "weapons of mass destruction." One of my concerns in saying this is that chemical weapons are in fact difficult to deliver in an attack on another country. I think sweeping them up into "weapons of mass destruction" gives the wrong impression and becomes a blank check for an attack by warmongers on any country that possesses even a small stockpile of them.

My brilliant and obvious response:

Wow this is a bit silly isn't it? A chemical weapon can be a battlefield weapon yet easily falls into the category of Weapon of Mass Destruction. To try to characterize it by one of its capabilities to the exclusion of the others is pretty dim. It can be an area denial weapon to shape a battlefield, an obstacle to an advancing army, or terrorist tool. While it is all of these, there is absolutely no reason not to consider it a Weapon of Mass Destruction because that is exactly what it does:

1) It is an area weapon, killing indiscriminately in the area in which it is deployed.
2) It can wipe out an entire city, i.e. Halabja (several thousands dead and save me the argument that it wasn’t that bad, I have seen the captured Iraqi videos and it is far worse than most Americans can even imagine)
3) There is no protection except with specially designed equipment.
4) It can be persistent in nature lasting for hours depending on weather and type.
5) Its effect is systemic attacking the body as a whole instead of a localized area making it much more difficult to treat.

These are all characteristics of WMD.

And then there is this bizarre little statement:

“One of my concerns in saying this is that chemical weapons are in fact difficult to deliver in an attack on another country.”

Says who? By what standard? The same delivery systems that use conventional warheads can often be converted to unconventional use. Therefore it is no more difficult than delivering a conventional weapon. If you are saying it is difficult to fire a chemical warhead into Washington DC from Tehran, yes it is. But the reality is that there are other deliver vehicles, water supply, spray from aircraft that can be done fairly easily if the chemical is smuggled into the foreign country. And the fact is that “ease of use” has nothing to do with whether a weapon system is a WMD. It is pretty hard to build and deliver a nuclear bomb. Does that mean it isn’t a WMD?

Comments

[swamp6]

Juan Cole is a buffoon.

[Scott Malensek]

"The liquid sarin was contained in plastic bags which each team then wrapped in newspapers. Each perpetrator carried two packets of sarin totalling approximately one litre of sarin, except Yasuo Hayashi, who carried three bags. A single drop of sarin the size of the head of a pin can kill an adult."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway#The_attack

Looks like Juan's a little off in his claims that chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction, that they're hard to employ, and that the wmd/terrorist idea is a baseless, fiction vaunted by warmongers.

Denial ain't a river in Egypt Juan