This Is What You're Going With?... Good Luck With That

Faced with leaving the Senate in about 6 months, Rick Santorum decided to push a completely irrelevant story today, arguing that 500 "WMD" have been found in Iraq since the start of the invasion. And you know, if I were to announce something this earth-shattering in magnitude, I'd definitely not give it to the Defense Department, but the Senator who doesn't sit on the Intelligence, Armed Services or Foreign Relations Commitees.

Taking a closer look at these so-called WMD, we find that they are, by the Senator's own words, "approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent." Sarin gas was likely to have been used in the Iran-Iraq war. It has a shelf life that degrades within several weeks to several months. According to Scott Ritter even stabilized sarin which is kept under close watch will become useless within 5 years. This stuff was buried near the Iranian border, and is likely between 20 and 25 years old.

Not only is this completely ridiculous, it's not even news. A sarin gas shell malfunctioned in 2004 in Fallujah, apparently used by insurgents who really didn't know what they were using, and it did no damage other than giving the soldier who found it a headache. And this was in the report that the Administration's own inspectors released:

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible Indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

The Defense Department won't use the proverbial 10-foot pole to touch this story:

Offering the official administration response to FOX News, a senior Defense Department official pointed out that the chemical weapons were not in useable conditions.

“This does not reflect a capacity that was built up after 1991,” the official said, adding the munitions “are not the WMDs this country and the rest of the world believed Iraq had, and not the WMDs for which this country went to war.”

Some apologists are saying that this breaking story was trusted to the junior Senator from Pennsylvania and not the executive branch (who is openly disavowing it) because we're covering up for France and Russia and China. This is so because those countries sold conventional weapons to Saddam (like we did). And they call liberals the ones that fall for giant conspiracy theories.

I'm sure Sen. Santorum appreciates the donation-in-writing to his campaign that the bloggers running with this nonsense are giving him, but he's probably not all that happy about how many on the right aren't on board with him.

Meanwhile, in the real world, workers in Iraq are being abducted, lawyers are pulled out of their homes and killed by men in police uniforms, Iraqi troops have been found to have killed US soldiers in cold blood, and the official Senate repsonse is stay the course. This is what we need to focus on, the real problems that we have over there, the absolute inability by the Republican leadership to come up with a plan for the Iraqis to take control of their own country, rather than some unexploded, long-forgotten, 25 year-old meaningless shells.