All these practical, logistical objections about Syria's Sarin

strike me as a little perverse... as somewhat sideways to the real tactical and strategic concerns posed by chemical wepaons.

Nobody cares (or at least should not care)whether Syria has 250 stray pounds of some Sarin precursor chemical in a drum somewhere. It is just not a big deal.

These are not nuclear weapons where letting even one slip through your fingers can mean the annihilation of an entire city.

A nation having some minor relict stocks of some chemical weapons or another is not a strategic consideration. Every nation has some industrial chemicals as poisonous as Sarin somewhere.

In sensible terms, Sarin is like napalm or cluster bombs or some other frowned upon ordinance. Unlike nukes, these things are not intrinsically OMG!!. They are OMG only when able to be used militarily in a big way.

And reducing "in a big way" to "meh" is fairly easy.

I wonder if we are having a Saddam Hussein hangover from the Bush argument that even one rusted barrel of Mustard Gas agent was (conceptually) an existential threat to the USA. (It would not have been.)


When someone says "It will take 2,000 inspectors operating in a battle zone for ten years," that means that doing some particular process the speaker envisions would be that difficult.


To render Syria a nation with no substantial chemical military capability, however, would merely be a matter of getting the great majority of weaponized stocks, and readily weaponizable stocks, piled up somewhere in the desert and saying, "Nobody fuck with this stuff."

Because we would know if any trucks were going there.

Having thus effectively disarmed the nation, one can worry about filling out the forms at leisure. (We still have stockpiles of VX nerve gas that we haven't gotten around to rendering inert. It does take a long time to extend the process out to the very last detail.)