Quote Originally Posted by makkyo
The fact that such a large weapons cache missed the eye of the weapons inspectors sugests a lot more about Saddam's capabilities and intent. I understand how it is possible to Saddam to simply loose track of them, but it is very unlikely considering that his power came from his military. And it is obvious that he uses them. For a peaceful country like the US, when the last time they even used WMD's in a military action was in WWII, I would think that the loss of these things would be more likely.
There were entire research programmes that didn't exist except on paper, as scientists lied to Saddam to get funding. The Iraqi bureaucracy was in a dreadful state, with departments not knowing what each other did due to centralised control from Saddam, and centralised control not being possible due to non-existent information gathering from the outlying departments.

For the reality of Saddam's military, read accounts from the commanders of his Republican Guard, supposedly his most trusted troops, kept in the dark as much as anyone else. Saddam the military mastermind? Hitler in his bunker would be a better comparison.

Quote Originally Posted by Xiahou
It's nice to see more objective reporting from the Guardian- Yep, anthrax vaccine is no different from weaponized anthrax loaded into artillery shells.

Yet another editorial passed off as a news story.
Are you deliberately missing the point? The point is that bureacracies throughout history haven't been able to keep track of every single piece of information they were supposed to keep track of. Not even the mighty US administration.

The reason why the US military haven't made much of WMD finds is probably because they didn't suppose the Iraqi government knew about them. There was one IED attack that involved a chemical shell, dated to the Iran-Iraq war. When pressed about this as a justification for the war, the spokesman replied that it was probably looted from a long-forgotten arms dump somewhere, and the design of the IED meant the insurgent himself probably didn't know it was a WMD.