{"id":191,"date":"2003-09-09T05:55:21","date_gmt":"2003-09-09T05:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:19","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:19","slug":"potemkin_wmd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=191","title":{"rendered":"Potemkin WMD"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s not on the web that I can find, but the AP has a story in this morning’s Daily Breeze headlined: Iraq’s own weapons count is questioned.<\/b><\/p>\n

No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor has any solid evidence for them turned up in Washington or London. But what about Baghdad’s patchy bookkeeping – the gaps that led U.N. Inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and biological weapons material as unaccounted for?<\/p>\n

Some may represent miscounts, and some may stem from underlings’ efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on arms output in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

“Under that sort of regime, you don’t admit you got it wrong,” said Ron G. Manley of Britain, a former chief U.N. adviser on chemical weapons.<\/p>\n

His encounters with Iraqi scientists in the 1980s convinced him that at times, when told to produce “X amount” of a weapons agent, “they wrote down what their superiors wanted to hear instead of the reality,” said Manley, who noted that producing VX nerve agent, for example, is a difficult process.<\/p>\n

American ex-inspector Scott Ritter said he, too, was sure Baghdad’s “WMD” accounts were at times overstated.<\/p>\n

“They put so much pressure on scientists to produce world-class systems, they would exaggerate their reports back to the authorities,” he said. As inspectors scrutinized factories and interrogated Iraqi specialists, “you suddenly realized that they weren’t as good as they say they were.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…as I was saying<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s not on the web that I can find, but the AP has a story in this morning’s Daily Breeze headlined: Iraq’s own weapons count is questioned. No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor has any solid evidence for them turned up in Washington or London. But what about Baghdad’s patchy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}