Demosophia

The Paradigmatic Watershed of the Sarin Shell

I've been preparing a longish post on the topic of media bias, for awhile, that touches on the Sarin shell discovery, but I thought I'd just get online and offer a few observations. "Pro-war" folks have become somewhat innoculated to the issue of WMD, so the discovery of the Sarin shell that was used in an IED recently has relatively minimal impact on us. But it's a seminal event to the anti-war crowd. Even though the story is being soft-pedaled by the media it can't be buried completely, and after an initial reference or two in the anti-war community to "obvious conclusions that it was a pre-1991 holdover of minimal importance" it soon became apparent that none of their low-ball explanations cut it. From the FOX News article:

The munition found was a binary chemical shell, meaning it featured two chambers, each containing separate chemical compounds. Upon impact with the ground after the shell is fired, the barrier between the chambers is broken, the chemicals mix and sarin is created and dispersed.

Even by UNSCOM's own standards the weapon could not have been manufactured as part of Saddam's early arsenal. They not only had no "binary" weapons that separated the two components within the device, but had, in fact, declared no binary artillery shells at all! From Blaster's Blog:

The Iraqis owned up to binary agents in aerial bombs and missile warheads. The technology UNSCOM reports, and US estimates refer to, is a "fill before firing" - i.e., one component is in the round, a second component added before use of the weapon. An aerial bomb would be veryeasy to do this with - it is basically a big metal tank. A fill plug is easy to include and use. Same with a missile warhead.

An artillery shell is different. It is much more likely to remain closed - thus requiring both components to be sealed in the shell - or have a removable baseplate, and two canisters put in with the components.

There are various declarations one can point to that show sarin in artillery, and binary capability, but you will not find a binary, mix in flight, artillery shell assigned to Iraqi capability.

That's what makes it a big discovery.

Yes indeed, Sarin is relatively easy to produce, and difficult to use to devastating effect on the battlefield, but the bottom line is that it's a WMD, and more importantly an undeclared WMD. As Bill Krystol held recently on NPR's Fresh Air program, the argument made by the US in the UN was not so much that Saddam had WMD capable of being used against allies in the near future, but the simple fact that he had, and was concealing, WMD., in direct violation of the UN resolution So, as the anti-war people know even better than most of the pro-war crowd, we've crossed a threshold. We know to a virtual certainty that Saddam had WMD that, for some reason, he chose to conceal from UNMOVIC. We can speculate about how much more is to be found in the future, and what it's utility was to Saddam, but the line that the anti-war movement established of it's own accord has been formally crossed, and their ability to use that argument seriously, perhaps fatally, compromised. They know this is devastating to them, even as their media downplays its significance. The paradigm has been broken.

What we have is a growing disparity between the social constructions produced by big media, and the actual situation being reflected through direct connections to the front and through the internet. We have to do something about the situation, quickly.

Posted by Demosophist at May 19, 2004 04:50 PM | TrackBack