Bush was Right!

I joke.

But this NYT article on the secret stores of chemical munitions found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion is pretty crazy.

First, clearly Bush supporters are going to claim this story about finding WMD as vindication for the war.  But of course it's way more complicated than that.

Second, there were certainly older stories that some old chemical munitions were found in Iraq, but this article indicates the scope was much larger than previously revealed.

Note, all of the old chemical weapons found were from before 1991 and not from an active WMD program. Also, note, many of the weapons had US origins.

The Pentagon kept the findings of most of these caches a secret. Apparently, this was for a few reasons:
a) soldiers kept getting exposed to chemical nerve agents when the Army was unprepared to deal with it, and it made the Pentagon look bad. Apparently the Army was prepared for chemical weapons when they first invaded, but not years later!
b) the Pentagon's handling of these weapons violated international rules on dealing with such weapons.
c) embarrassment that chemical munitions were used by insurgents to make IEDs.
d) embarrassment that --

In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies."

Worth noting that the article is chock full of 3's and threes.