Juan Cole in this 05/17/04 post talks about the latest high-level assassination in Iraq, plus this:
Another bombing in Baghdad near US troops on Saturday had involved the use of sarin gas. Two US soldiers suffered slight reactions to the gas. This was probably just an old 1980s shell of the sort used against the Kurds and Iranians, and nothing suggests many of these remain or are still operative. The insurgents who used it may not even have known what it was. (It was not marked). A couple left-over stray such shells does not prove that there were WMD in Iraq in any signifcant sense. No doubt it will set off a frenzy among the latter-day Juan Ponce de Leones looking vainly for the Fountain of WMDs. It is virtually a non-story.
US aircraft bombed Karbala overnight. Now that is a story.
I can't believe I just wrote the words above. I would not be writing them if Bush had any idea whatsoever what he was doing in Iraq. Bombing Karbala. It must be being seen by Shiites as like a sci-fi Terminator sort of Yazid.
Every time I think things cannot get worse, they do.
It will be interesting to see if any independent observers can confirm that even this latest report involved actual nerve gas. So far, all the "discoveries" of even trace amounts of WMDs have in Iraq have turned out to be false alarms.
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