Informed Comment

Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute

Monday, May 22, 2006

Responses to Critics: Open Thread

I don't want to give the impression that I am unduly interested in the cottage industry that has grown up on the US Right of, let us say, severely critiquing my work. It comes with the territory that if you become a public figure, you get attacked. In fact, even very, very minor status as a public figure opens you to having virtually anything said about you with impunity, including that you have been impregnated by green Martians. In my world, of academia, people are usually good about going to the source and double-checking assertions, so these National Enquirer type pieces don't have, I think, much purchase there. But some kind readers have suggested that I ought to do a point by point reply to critics just so the record is straight somewhere. But the scribblers for hire are legion and who has time?

I'm going to set this entry up as a place for kind readers who would do me the favor of going through the various Rightwing rap sheets on me, beginning with Frontpagerag, and see if they can refute them point by point from my weblog. It should be almost as entertaining as the puzzles in the DaVinci Code. I don't have time to spend on that sort of thing myself, but I would have time to put the final results up somewhere as a reference page.

Here's one for the books. Michael Rubin charges that I said that the American Jewish community wanted to make US troops gurkhas for Israel. Here is what I actually said:


' Here is my take on the Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal in the Pentagon.

It is an echo of the one-two punch secretly planned by the pro-Likud faction in the Department of Defense. First, Iraq would be taken out by the United States, and then Iran. David Wurmser, a key member of the group, also wanted Syria included. These pro-Likud intellectuals concluded that 9/11 would give them carte blanche to use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv (not wars that really needed to be fought, but wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel's ability to annex land and act aggressively, especially if someone else's boys did the dying). '


One of the sleazy tricks of the Revisionist Zionists is to try to make specific statements about specific persons seem as though they are generalized bigotry. Thus, I was complaining about the small rightwing group that produce "A Clean Break," naming David Wurmser. Rubin transforms this fairly obvious specific analysis, claiming that I generalized it to prominent American Jewish leaders, which is not exactly the same as what I said. David Wurmser is a prominent Jewish leader? In fact, of course, nearly half of American Jews opposed the Iraq War at a time when it had a 75 percent approval rating among the general US public. What looks like a critique of a statement of mine by Rubin turns out to be a complete misquotation and smear.

One of the odd little arrows in the quiver of my critics is that I said that chemical weapons are more properly characterized as battlefield weapons than as "weapons of mass destruction." One of my concerns in saying this is that chemical weapons are in fact difficult to deliver in an attack on another country. I think sweeping them up into "weapons of mass destruction" gives the wrong impression and becomes a blank check for an attack by warmongers on any country that possesses even a small stockpile of them.

My categorization of them as battlefield weapons is not in fact controversial. I've read enough military history and seen enough interviews with generals and experts to know that. Here is just one piece of confirmatory evidence, from an expert in the field in an NPR article.

Kind readers who have other such evidence for this point of view are invited to post it.



National Public Radio (NPR)

SHOW: Talk of the Nation 1500-1600 PM

May 8, 2006 Monday

LENGTH: 5971 words

HEADLINE: A History of Chemical Weapons

ANCHORS: NEAL CONAN

BODY:


NEAL CONAN, host . . .


Mr. TUCKER: Yeah, I think it's important to distinguish between tactical weapons and strategic weapons. Chemical weapons were really designed for battlefield use. They--very large quantities are required to cover these--the size of a city. So they are not really contemplated as strategic weapons the way nuclear weapons would be used against entire cities. So perhaps there is some distinction there. Whether chemical weapons should be called weapons of mass destruction is somewhat debatable. They are really more tactical or battlefield weapons. . . '



Here is the guest's bio:

Mr. JONATHAN TUCKER (Author, War of Nerves; Senior Fellow, Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute)

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14 Comments:

At 8:27 PM, BadTux said...

The most deadly terrorist attack in history that used chemical weapons were the Sarin attacks upon the Tokyo subways. Total dead: 12. And this was under ideal circumstances -- an enclosed area (subway trains and tunnels) crowded with people, a population and authorities not aware of the possibility of chemical attack, and gallons of Sarin agent created under ideal laboratory conditions in an advanced economy. Sarin, or any organophosphate nerve agent, simply isn't useful except under very limited conditions, and even under those conditions it's difficult to deploy in a way that will create mass deaths.

Meanwhile, terrorists armed with box cutters killed thousands with airplane bombs on September 11, 2001. Terrorists armed with car bombs have killed thousands in Iraq. Terrorists armed with a truck bomb killed hundreds of U.S. Marines in Lebanon. Terrorists armed with a truck bomb killed hundreds of U.S. citizens at the Oklahoma City Federal Courthouse in 1995.

Note that Sarin is one of the most effective nerve agents. If I were a terrorist, would I use a nerve agent as part of my next attack? Or would I use a car or truck or airplane bomb, which have proven to be many times more effective as a terrorist weapon, and can be created with nothing more than fertilizer, diesel fuel, and a common alarm clock, all of which can be purchased domestically in any city of the United States?

Hmm... hard choice, eh? Yeah right...

BTW, chemical weapons are relatively useless as a battlefield weapon too, except under trench warfare circumstances. No modern military does trench warfare. Apparently Saddam agreed with my assessment of the usefulness of chemical weapons in the modern world, considering that the Duelfer Report pretty much verifies that he destroyed them all by the mid 1990's as useless -- after all, they helped the Iraqi army a whole lot during the first Gulf War, eh? (In fact, the order to fire was issued... but because the U.S. Army doesn't do trench warfare, the artillery positions with the chemical weapons shells had been captured or destroyed from the air long before they could be used).

-BT

 
At 8:28 PM, Deacon said...

Chemical weapons can be difficult to classify.

They aren't particularly effective as battlefield weapons, unless you are using them against enclosed spaces (trenches, bunkers, urban areas) because they dissipate so rapidly in open areas. Also, their efficacy varies from person to person and length/amount of exposure. Blister agents will be painful against open skin, but can be deadly if inhaled.

That being said, nerve agents like Sarin gas could qualify due to their rapid reaction time and lethality. The Tokyo subway attack showed the danger of such a gas in an enclosed area. The threat from these kinds of weapons seems largely from small-scale terrorist attacks rather than warfare.

I remember hearing how dangerous Saddam's Scuds were, how they would drop Mustard gas. Then, before crossing the LOD in 2003, we heard reports that Scuds had been launched. Panic, briefly, then nothing. They had missed their targets, detonating in open desert (no thanks to the Patriots sent up to intercept). Remembering my NBC training, and seeing everyone sleeping in full MOPP gear and gas masks, the danger was almost nonexistent without a direct hit, and then I would worry more about the blast igniting fuel tanks. The desert is probably the worst place to use chemical weapons unless you're using them on a group of undefended villagers.

It does seem that the WMD classification is largely to justify Bush's model of pre-emptive anytime, all-the-time war.

Maybe if we got rid of ours . . . naw, sorry. Wishful thinking.

 
At 10:53 PM, Kevin Donoghue said...

The late Robin Cook made a clear distinction between chemical weapons and true weapons of mass destruction in the resignation speech he gave on leaving the Blair cabinet in protest at the decision to go to war without UN authorisation:

"We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.

"Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

"It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories.

 
At 11:04 PM, Friendly Fire said...

What did Robin Cook say in his resignation speech?

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term--namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for twenty years, and which we helped to create?

 
At 12:48 AM, sherm said...

The most potent WMD of our time was Osma Bin Laden's act of empowering George W Bush on Sept 12, 2001. The creation of a "war president" on 9/12 was all that was needed for mass destruction.

 
At 2:05 AM, Q said...

Allison Macfarlane, a Research Associate with the Security Studies Program at MIT discusses the destructive power of chemical weapons and concluded:

The question remains, are these all weapons of mass destruction? If we accept that nuclear weapons truly cause mass destruction and death, and we calibrate mass destruction against the hundred-
thousand-odd fatalities that nuclear weapons can cause, are chemical and biological weapons commensurate? Clearly, chemical weapons are not in the same category as nuclear weapons. At most, an attack carried out under ideal climatic conditions would result in a few thousands
of deaths.


Hers is the 14th in the sequence of papers linked here

http://tinyurl.com/h9joy

 
At 2:48 AM, HubrisSonic said...

I am no General, but during my 7 years in Special Forces, Chemical Weapons were ALWAYS refered to as battlefield weapons.

 
At 4:58 AM, Jesus del Norte said...

It's the right wing. It has nothing to do with truth, justice or the american way of life.

When its a government they want to overthrow, then everything that government has or would like to have are WMD

When it's them throwing nuclear bombs at at Iranian 'weapon production sites', then these weapons are merely tactical weapons

 
At 5:54 AM, johnMccutchen said...

Timothy Noah tackled this question in Slate some years ago now. (Links in original) - Carnegie Endowment, esp Carincione (now with New America Fndn???) would also be a good search source...

This is a case where common Bush/Cheney lies, sadly, have become Conventional Wisdom

That chemical and biological weapons don't deserve to be called "weapons of mass destruction" is a point long familiar to arms control experts. Here, for example, is Gert G. Harigel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:

The term "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD), used to encompass nuclear (NW), biological (BW), and chemical weapons (CW), is misleading, politically dangerous, and cannot be justified on grounds of military efficiency. …Whereas protection with various degrees of efficiency is possible against chemical and biological weapons, however inconvenient it might be for military forces on the battlefield and for civilians at home, it is not feasible at all against nuclear weapons.

Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky spells out the comparative lethality of nuclear versus chemical and biological weapons in the April 1998 issue of Arms Control Today, in an article headlined "Dismantling the Concept of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' ":

The weapons detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed about a quarter of a million people, had an explosive power about one-tenth that carried by a modern nuclear weapon. … If a 1-megaton thermonuclear warhead exploded at optimum altitude over a large city, little would be left standing or alive within five miles. A firestorm could be ignited, further extending the range of destruction. In a large-scale exchange, lethal fallout would cover an entire region.

Biological and chemical weapons, though certainly very nasty, are not nearly so deadly:

If virulent BW materials were to be widely distributed over an exposed population, then the ratio of potential lethality to the total weight of the material could be comparable to that of nuclear weapons. However, for this horrifying scenario to occur, the materials cannot be dispersed by a single-point explosion, but instead must be spread by an appropriate mechanism such as spray tanks or by "fractionating" a missile's payload and dispersing separate mini-munitions over a wide area. Moreover, survival of BW material depends critically on local meteorological and other conditions which define the delivery environment. The survival of agents is generally of short duration and effects are delayed for days. … There is little question that the lethality of chemical weapons—as measured by per unit weight of delivered munitions—is lower by many orders of magnitude than it is for nuclear weapons or the undemonstrated and inherently uncertain potential of biological weapons.

 
At 5:20 PM, ent lord said...

My grandfather was a WW1 veteran and his view of mustard gas and other such weapons consisting of materials delivered via artillary shell was that it was effective as a psychological weapon when first used but decreased in efficacy as troops became accustomed to the weapon. Usually, there was enough warning to allow the troops to don gas masks and the major worry was that the mask would malfunction.
Battlefield conditions were such that shifting winds could send the gas cloud back over to your own men and. since the gas is heavier than air, it tended to sink and to linger in lower lying areas or in trenches, which is why it was effective in trench warfare.
In a modern, mobile war, troops under gas attack simply manuever until they are out of the kill zone for the gas.
WMD? Explosives are much easier; I worry much more about a terrorist hijacking a tanker (18 wheeler) of gasoline and crashing it into an elementary school. The Beltway Sniper has already shown us how one random nut can tie down the country. The terrorists don't need hi tech weapons and they don't need nukes.

 
At 10:41 PM, Juan said...

A kind and informed reader writes:

thanks for your little bit on chemical weapons as WMD. That argument is such a crock. The most effective weapons of mass destruction outside of nukes are inarguably high explosives (and nukes are of course high explosives themselves). There are reasons that the Germans didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II, and humanitarianism was hardly at the top of the list. In mobile warfare – as all conventional warfare has been since the end of WW I – chemical weapons are pretty ineffective. They are also very easily defensed. High explosives and projectiles (i.e., bullets), on the other hand, were able to kill 20-30 million Russians. In fact, the Germans were willing to use chemical weapons, but only in the enclosed prisons of the gas chamber and the gas van. For mass executions outside of these confined spaces, they relied on gunnery. Another thing: in WW I, no more than 1% of the deaths were from chemical weapons. Disease took its share, of course, but well over 80% of the deaths involved an explosive agent.

One final thing to think about with regard to this. When the Japanese cult attacked the subway system with a nerve agent a number of years back, they only killed 12 or so people despite painstaking preparation. Not long after 9/11, on the other hand, a disgruntled South Korean worker tossed a Molotov cocktail into a Seoul subway that created an intense fire and killed over a 100 people.

I’m also quite sure that Saddam killed far more Iranians and Iraqis with bullets and bombs than with chemical weapons.

The fact that “daisy cutters,” cluster bombs, and AC-130s (see http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/ac-130.htm for more) aren’t considered weapons of mass destruction while toxic gases that are all of a sudden rendered ineffective by a strong breeze are is a cruel irony. I’m not saying that they’re harmless, of course; it’s just that they don’t kill nearly as effectively as what we use.

 
At 9:48 AM, AlaskaRon said...

I disagree with the characterization of biological weapons as not being weapons of mass destruction. Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky, for instance, is considering the biological weapons that we hear most about- the tactical biological weapons. Anthrax, for instance, is spread by spores and is not highly contagious, so it plays essentially the same role as a chemical weapon. Toxins such as ricin and botulism toxin similarly have to be applied directly to the target population. Strategic biological weapons, on the other hand, would be those that are highly contagious and either disable people or destroy food crops. An example of a biological weapon that is certainly a weapon of mass destruction would be smallpox, if spread in a non-vaccinated population such as that of India (http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1823/18230890.htm). Strains of a contagious disease could be developed that are especially virulent. Such a disease could easily end up killing more people than a nuclear attack would.

 
At 11:12 PM, Jeff said...

The problem with a strategic biological agent is the same as with chemical weapons - the threat of blowback, only multiplied a million times. You release a virulent disease into the population and it probably will kill you, too. Some of the nastier ones could wipe out a huge chunk of the global population in a matter of months.

None of these truly dangerous agents can, to my knowledge, be weaponized except under carefully controlled lab conditions. Certainly not the field conditions availablt to your average Al Qaeda recruit. No sane or even insane government would ever give such agents to terrorists for the reasons cited above - they kill everyone, not just your enemies.

The only people who would use such weapons are those actively trying to bring about the end of all human life on earth. Which is to say, it's possible, but I fear the possibility of a major asteroid impact more than Osama bin Laden attacking us with some kind of weaponized ebola.

 
At 8:11 AM, Sam Thornton said...

Speaking of car bombs, as someone mentioned above, I recently learned that, clever people as we are, the car bomb is an American invention.

"Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb," I read, contains an informative history.

According to an April 24, 2007 article by John Freeman in the St. Petersburg Times, "The first car bomb on record exploded in September 1920 on the corner of Wall and Broad streets outside of the offices of J.P. Morgan. The vehicle was a horse-drawn wagon, the culprit Mario Buda, an anarchist; the victims 40 passersby, some of whom were mangled beyond recognition."

 

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