Making the world a safer place

The US invasion of Iraq is full of horrific ironies. A "war on terror" has encouraged terorism. A war to bring human rights has instead brought torture and death squads and abuses assessed by Iraqis themselves as "worse than under Saddam". And now a war ostensibly fought to prevent terrorists from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction has seen the Iraqi resistance using chemical weapons.

The Iraqi gas bombs are as crude as you can get - a cylinder of chlorine with a bomb attached - but they are effective enough. The raw material is widely available - chlorine can be found whereever there are water treatment facilities - and the idea seems to be getting around fast. There were three gas attacks last week alone, and US forces have found a bomb factory where the bombs were being made. Once perfected, the technique will no doubt spread to other conflicts - just as the use of roadside bombs and suicide bombers has.

So much for the idea that the fighting terrorism in Iraq would make the world a safer place...

Tear gas and escalation

What might happen if the US actually uses tear gas on the battlefield? One possibility is escalation. According to the article I linked to earlier,

In four major uses of chemical weapons in the past — by combatants in World War I; by the Italians in Ethiopia; by the Egyptians in Yemen; and in the Iran-Iraq war — deployment was preceded by use of non-lethal agents

So it's entirely possible that the US using tear gas could provoke Saddam into letting fly with whatever stocks of VX and mustard gas he's managed to hide from the inspectors. Needless to say, this would be a Bad Thing. OTOH, provoking Saddam into using chemical weapons would prove that the US was right all along to be suspicious of inspections, and Rumsfeld and his NeoCon pals might consider it worth the price of a bad precedent and a few thousand coalition soldiers and civillians dead or maimed. And if we want to get really cynical, the US has threatened to use nuclear weapons in response to any chemical attack; provoking such an attack would allow the US to impress the world with its military power (getting the second half of oderint dum metuant) and avoid all that icky high-casualty street-fighting in Baghdad.

OK, so the latter is just cynical and possibly paranoid; OTOH do you really trust Rumsfeld and the Project for the New American Century not to think like that?

I guess the best we can hope for is that Saddam doesn't have anything - then we'll just have to deal with a marauding hegemon tearing up yet another global treaty... business as usual, I guess.