Cole Responds
to the Frontpagemagazine piece. Lots of invective but nothing to counter the arguments or facts given. Which is, of course, standard procedure.
posted by JCH | 10:32 AM
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1 Comments:
One of the things the *Frontpage* article chides Cole for is saying that chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction. Actually, that statement is perfectly defensible, and it has been made by people with political views quite different from Cole's. To wit, Gregg Easterbook in the *New Republic* in 2002 criticzed the grouping together of nucleat, chemical, and biological weapons as WMDs:
"Yet their lethal potential is emphatically not equivalent. Chemical weapons are dangerous, to be sure, but not 'weapons of mass destruction' in any meaningful sense. In actual use, chemical arms have proven less deadly than regular bombs, bullets, and artillery shells. Since the gassing of the trenches in World War I and the Holocaust a generation later, people have been terrified by the thought of death by gas--partly because chemical agents are invisible, partly because we visualize ghastly, helpless choking rather than vanishing in the flash of an explosion. But pound for pound, chemical weapons are less lethal than conventional explosives and more difficult for an attacker or terrorist to use. It's also hard to see what the moral distinction is between being killed by gas and being blown up. Modern artillery shells create horrific scenes of carnage, and yet we don't view them as weapons of 'mass destruction,' though firing them into an unsuspecting city could readily produce more deaths than gas...
"The phrase 'weapons of mass destruction,' then, obscures more than it clarifies. It lumps together a category of truly terrible weapons (atomic bombs) with two other categories that are either less dangerous than conventional weapons (chemical arms) or largely an unknown quantity (biological agents). This conflation, moreover, muddies the American rationale for military action against Iraq. That rationale should be to prevent Saddam from acquiring atomic weapons. This alone is reason to go to war..."
The *New Republic* site is only available for subscribers, but it has been reposted at http://www.why-war.com/news/2002/10/07/weaponso.html
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