UNITED NATIONS 04/29/1998 � The U.N.'s chief arms inspector for Iraq said Tuesday that experts discovered
active mustard gas last month in artillery shells found at an Iraqi ammunitions depot in 1996, raising new questions
about more than 500 to 700 similar shells that are still unaccounted for in Iraq.
The inspector, Richard Butler, said at a news conference Tuesday that this case, which he described to the
Security Council on Monday, illustrated the recurrent problems encountered by his U.N. Special Commission
since it was charged in 1991 with eliminating Iraq's prohibited weapons and the means to manufacture them. |
Perhaps in government thinking, five to seven hundred missing artillery shells
aren't so many. To me, that seems like a big number, especially when you
consider that the likelihood of only one of them having an active chemical
agent inside of it is very slim. Let's get real here.... |
Mustard gas is a chemical agent that blisters the skin and lungs, burns the eyes and can cause cancers in the
mouth, throat and respiratory tract. Commission officials said Tuesday that they had long suspected that the
155-millimeter shells that Iraq was known to have and that remain unaccounted for were likely to have been filled
with mustard gas.
At least four of the 155-millimeter shells were found in 1996 at an ammunition depot in central Iraq, Butler
said. The shells were not tested until March of this year, after Iraq argued that they were no longer active. |
It is horrible to contemplate that there are such horrible weapons
around in our world. The fact remains that they are there, and certain people seem
willing to at least think about using them. I can understand the team wanting to take
the Iraqi word on the issue that the shells were not active. Yet now that
they have been tested, how can we trust them the next time they say something
is not active, or that there are no chemical weapons? |
On Tuesday, Iraq's foreign minister, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, said at a news conference here that Iraq
destroyed all its prohibited weapons in 1991. Carrying on an endless search for banned arms is an
"unprecedented injustice to the Iraqi people," he said.
"One of their claims," Butler said of the Iraqis, "was that even if shells like this did exist, they would be useless
because the weapons agent inside would be so old that it would have polymerized � it would have hardened
and been useless. That's why we drilled holes in a couple of them to see if that were true. And it turned out to be
very untrue." |
It seems like this is an endless search to me, too. However, my point of
view is probably a lot different from the foreign minister's. I think we
have been searching way too long. Iraq could have been cooperative in this
effort, and they could have just come clean... been honest with us all in the
first place, so the conclusion we must draw is that they want the inspectors
to slowly drag the truth out. Otherwise they would have made this a much easier,
faster, less painful process, right? |
| This article, "Active mustard gas found in Iraqi shell", was found online at The Deseret News, which is
published in Salt Lake City, Utah. The original URL is http://www.desnews.com/wir/ud0luckf.htm. |
This is just how I see the situation. --Ivy |
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