Saturday - February 06, 2010

Half a Story is Worse than None

At last! Have they finally found a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in Iraq?

By Carol Driver

They have been searching in Iraq for the past nine years, 10 months and 15 days.

Today, the hard work finally paid off as soldiers found one of those elusive ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that Saddam Hussein was supposed to have been hiding.

You know and I know that Saddam had WMD, even after Gulf War I. You know he lied to the UN inspectors until he was blue in the face. But when our Democrats ran over there to tell him we were about to invade in 2003, he trucked all his dark arts to the Bakka Valley in Syria. Hell, satellite pictures of the convoys were on the TV news. The rest is buried in the sand. And the one thing they have LOTS of in Iraq is sand. So it could take centuries to dig everything up.

Ok, so some soldiers found a missile. That’s nice. But it isn’t WMD. It’s just a missile. A old model, short range cruise missile, used for ship to ship or surface to surface attacks. China was only too happy to sell as many of these things to both Iran and Iraq during their war.

The HY-2, often called the “Silkworm” by mistake but more properly called the “Seersucker” has a range of about 200km and can carry a 513kg warhead. 1100 pounds. Not a very big bomb as bombs go.

Could the warhead be poison gas, biological agents, or a pocket nuke? Sure, why not? All you need to do is design one that fits.* But this news article flat out says that “It is not yet known whether the seven-metre rocket is armed with a warhead.” So NOBODY KNOWS. Heck, it’s just as likely that this one is Iranian, since Baghdad is within it’s range from the border. It looks crashed, and while we all know that Saddam used gas against the Kurds up north, we’ve never heard that he launched cruise missiles against his own people.
That would also explain all the graffiti. I’m sure the Persian ord crews scribble on the bombs and stuff just like our guys do.

So this is irresponsible journalism. Don’t be fooled. It’s not WMD until they find the warhead and analyze it. And even then, it’s just one. Which could still be Iranian. Crap.

Grrr, it really chaps my ass that reporters can’t learn to identify weapons.  And they can’t differentiate delivery systems from payloads. This took me half an hour to figure out this morning, and I’d never seen a picture of a P-15/HY-2 before in my life. Do your jobs, dammit, or hand back your press pass.



h/t to Sara and Vilmar

* no information that I have found about the HY-2/P-15/SS-N-2 missile has mentioned nuclear, biological, or chemical capability. That only means that no nation that owned these things ever admitted to trying to rig such a warhead. Mostly this one was used to attack ships with, either from shore defense points or from ship to ship.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/06/2010 at 11:39 PM   
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