My guess? Claiming that you know 100% about mobile weapons labs and giant factories full of Sarin that turn out to be totally fake... ...but failing to spot chemical shells sitting out in the open like easter eggs even after you've mapped the entire goddamn country down to the inch in 3D... ...makes you look like you don't have your shit together.
Rove was in control of the message, so that's entirely possible. However, you would think that it wouldn't hurt to at least do a soft push to the press. They wouldn't have to make the case that they were right, but just allow enough awareness to give their proxies ammunition. I can see not wanting to have to clean it up, but how hard could that be? I'm just not satisfied that it was only a matter of politics. Where did they get those shells? Rumsfeld?A 1994 congressional inquiry also found that dozens of biological agents, including various strains of anthrax, had been shipped to Iraq by US companies, under licence from the commerce department.
So this will be long. Apologies in advance. "Chemical weapons" are a boogeyman for most people, journalists included. They are things that people throw around as if their existence were binary and as if they were literally hitler. However, a little study and they diversify into a spectrum from improvised household products to turnkey munitions. "WMD" is a stupid label. For some reason, you either have it or you don't, unlike say Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) which are counted as Inventory. The press wants to have a discussion about boogeyman WMD when the discussion we need to have is munitions inventory. INCONTROVERTIBLE FACT: Saddam Hussein had (and used) a shit-ton of chemical weapons prior to the Gulf War. Hussein spent 5 hours dropping nerve and mustard munitions on the Kurds in Halabja as part of the Anfal. This was a known part of popular culture, discussed at length on American news. INCONTROVERTIBLE (but lesser-known) FACT: Every member of the Coalition of the Willing" was scared shitless of the biowar and chemical agents Hussein had stockpiled. The United States didn't have enough Anthrax vaccines to go around (another interesting story there - we'll sidebar it if anyone is interested) and there was much jockeying as to who would be first in the ground invasion based on access to vaccines. (Source - yes, that Judith Miller) So we knew something was up, and we were scared of it. INCONTROVERTIBLE FACT: Members of Congress were blown away by the amount of chemical weapons we found. Senator Dick Cheney, former aide to Richard Nixon and Ford Administration Chief of Staff, was particularly disturbed by all the shit the CIA didn't know and raked them over the coals. Noteworthy: That guy who tried to help Hussein out? Yeah, colleague. CONTROVERSIAL FACT: We blew up chemical weapons factories we didn't even know were there. This is in Judith Miller's book, which was published in 2002. We've done a damn good job of hiding the fact that Gulf War Syndrome is related to the fact that we lofted a shit-ton of Sarin gas over our troops by accident. Alarms went off and we told the troops to ignore them. It's in USA Today and stuff these days, but during the Bush Administration? Fuck no, we ain't talkin' 'bout that. CONTROVERSIAL FACT(s): The CIA kept telling the Bush Administration that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. The UN kept telling the world (and the Bush Administration) that Saddam Hussein had no WMD. But Dick Cheney had been chief of staff under Ford, when the Director of Central Intelligence was George H. Bush, so he knew all the manpower and expertise the CIA had lost in the Halloween Massacre and had seen first-hand the catastrophe it had had on foreign policy. Further, this same CIA, not to put too fine a point on it, caused Gulf War Syndrome. CONCLUSION: So you've got an administration that knows there are chemical weapons in Iraq. You've got a public that knows chemical weapons are wicked bad. You've got a prior scandal you're barely able to keep a lid on related to how badly you fucked up the intel 10 years previously and the intel is truly fucked because the administration cooked it so badly. Meanwhile the desert is littered with chemical munitions and there are birth defects and cancer all the fuck over Iraq but what does it get blamed on? Depleted Uranium. Sidenote: I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, possibly the most nuclear place on earth. My father's career, spanning 50 years, has been radiation dosimetry. In other words, he's the guy that measures and monitors background radiation to prevent health effects. And when I asked him about depleted uranium back in 2002, he mentioned that the amount of radiation kicked back off the average DU munition is such that he'd be unconcerned sprinkling some on his cereal. Mine is a family with a Strangelovian disregard for the health effects of radiation, to be sure - but we aren't idiots. We're realists. We know Iraq has been a chemical playground lo these many decades. We know the amount of chemical munitions exposure from 30 years of intermittent war has been greater than anticipated. And we know that the Bush Administration cooked the books to get the war they wanted, not the war they deserved. Somebody was going to do the calcs. X # of chemical munitions counted after the Gulf War plus X# of chemical munitions manufactured between Gulf War and Iraq War (zero) minus X# of chemical munitions destroyed under UN observation minus X# of chemical munitions found abandoned, lying in the desert EQUALS ...more or less zero. I mean, look at this shit. every.possible.answer benefits the Bush administration more than "whoopsie, found 'em." The UN destroyed 900 chemical warheads for Scud missiles and over 40,000 chemical munitions after the Gulf War. There wasn't a lot of plausibility for Saddam's rolling meth labs or whatever. There's even less when reports on the ground indicate that the shit is lying about like a bunch of busted-ass El Caminos. Better to let sleeping dogs lie, particularly when you started a war over it.