伊拉克武器来源（伊拉克用什么武器）

这个问题之所以到现在还争论不休，是因为各方对于美国战争理由犯错的地方没有正确的认识。

首先来看自由派媒体的解释。纽约时报[1]的说法是，美国入侵的理由是声称伊拉克在1991年后依然有制造WMD的行为，结果后来即使是美国人自己去找，也只能找到1991年以前生产的，因此美国入侵不合理：

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.

Then, during the long occupation, American troops began encountering old chemical munitions in hidden caches and roadside bombs. Typically 155-millimeter artillery shells or 122-millimeter rockets, they were remnants of an arms program Iraq had rushed into production in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war.

All had been manufactured before 1991, participants said. Filthy, rusty or corroded, a large fraction of them could not be readily identified as chemical weapons at all. Some were empty, though many of them still contained potent mustard agent or residual sarin. Most could not have been used as designed, and when they ruptured dispersed the chemical agents over a limited area, according to those who collected the majority of them.

In case after case, participants said, analysis of these warheads and shells reaffirmed intelligence failures. First, the American government did not find what it had been looking for at the war’s outset, then it failed to prepare its troops and medical corps for the aged weapons it did find.

美国政府为了掩盖自己的错误，甚至不向它送去处理化学武器的士兵通报老旧化学武器存在这一事实，同时军医也被蒙在鼓里。这种行为导致受化武伤害的士兵无法得到及时妥善的治疗。政府甚至对他们受害这一事实都不予承认。

The American government withheld word about its discoveries even from troops it sent into harm’s way and from military doctors.The government’s secrecy, victims and participants said, prevented troops in some of the war’s most dangerous jobs from receiving proper medical care and official recognition of their wounds.

“I felt more like a guinea pig than a wounded soldier,” said a former Army sergeant who suffered mustard burns in 2007 and was denied hospital treatment and medical evacuation to the United States despite requests from his commander.

但就像亲共和党媒体指出的那样，布什政府发动伊拉克战争的理由里有指责他隐藏1991年前就已生产的WMD的内容，所以NYT的说法并不完全。

@孟德尔

那么萨达姆真的隐藏了老旧的WMD吗？领导CIA在战后对伊拉克WMD问题进行最终调查的Charles Duelfer的答案[2]是否定的：“萨达姆根本就不知道这些（入侵后在伊拉克发现的）武器的存在。。。这些武器在军事上没有多大价值，他没有必要隐藏它们。

In an interview with The Intercept, Charles Duelfer, head of the CIA’s definitive post-war investigation of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, explained that “Saddam didn’t know he had it … This is stuff Iraqi leaders did not know was left lying around. It was not a militarily significant capability that they were, as a matter of national policy, hiding.”

萨达姆怎么会不知道自己有WMD呢？Duelfer解释道：“伊拉克在两伊战争期间使用了101000枚化学弹。。。他们关于化武流向的记录出现一些差错是毫不奇怪的。”NYT的系列报道中也提到，伊拉克的化武弹药常常和常规弹药有着相同的外观。

The second category was simply ordnance that the Iraqi military had lost track of. Says Duelfer, “Keeping in mind that they used 101,000 munitions in the Iran-Iraq War … it’s not really surprising that they have imperfect accounting. I bet the U.S. couldn’t keep track of many of its weapons produced and used during a war.” And as the Times series notes, Iraq’s chemical shells often looked identical to its conventional ones: “An X-ray of internal features was sometimes the only way to tell [the difference].”

依旧难以置信？Duelfer指出，拿美国自己来说，在入侵伊拉克的第一年里就有价值十二亿美元的装备去向不明（a discrepancy of $1.2 billion between the amount of materiel shipped to Army activities in the theater of operations and the amount of materiel that those activities acknowledged they received[3])；华盛顿特区最高档的街区之一地下埋有1918年生产的化学武器，直到1993才被发现。同样的，在04-11年这段时间里，在欧洲和伊拉克发现的残留化学武器数量大约相等。

As Duelfer points out, the U.S. military itself is itself not immune to losing things; the federal government’s General Accounting Office found $1.2 billion worth of equipmentwas misplaced in just the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And in a situation oddly analogous to the munitions found in Iraq, in 1993 contractors digging the foundations for new mansions in one of Washington, D.C.’s most expensive neighborhoods discovered a cache of chemical weapons manufactured by the U.S. Army in 1918.Similarly, during the 2004-11 period in which 5,000 chemical munitions were found in Iraq, about the same number dating from World War I were apparently found in Europe.

那鲍威尔在联合国作证的时候所播放的，截获到的伊拉克军人在转移WMD以防止联合国核查人员发现的通讯又是怎么回事呢？通讯原话为“我们已经清理干净了”，而鲍威尔在翻译的时候，加上了自己的解释：“他们在说‘我们没摧毁它们，我们也没有将它们拿出来供核查人员检视、销毁。我们把场地清理干净，是为了瞒过核查人员。’”事实上，当时士兵们是在按照萨达姆将化武从常规弹药中清理出来的指令行事。

Colin Powell played intercepted audio of Iraqi soldiers discussing this at his infamous U.N. presentation but doctored[4] the translation to make it appear suspicious; in fact, the soldiers were following Saddam’s orders to make certain they did not accidentally have chemical munitions mixed in with their conventional ones.

如此也就不难理解为什么娘糠们不像他们的支持者那样有心情庆祝在伊拉克找到WMD了：

Thanks in part to the failure of centrist and liberal media to explain this clearly, it’s now cemented as an article of faith on much of the right that Iraq was concealing weapons of mass destruction. Given this, many conservatives have been asking plaintively why Bush never took his own side in the argument. In fact, according to a recent story in TheDaily Beast, during the Bush administration some Republican lawmakers wanted the president to hold a press conference with some of the old Iraqi chemical munitions while wearing a protective suit. However, the Bush White House — in what was surely a first for them — declined to do something incredibly foolish, rash and dangerous involving Iraqi WMD.

最后，发一条最近几天的消息，布莱尔亲口承认[5]没有找到可以证明入侵合法性的WMD：

"I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought."

References

[1]

.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

[2]

https://theintercept.com/2015/04/10/twelve-years-later-u-s-media-still-cant-get-iraqi-wmd-story-right/

[3]

http

[4]

https://books.google.nl/books?id=njup4EMeRMoC&lpg=PA1&dq=%22had+decided+to+add+his+personal+interpretation+of+the+intercepts+to+the+rehearsed+script,+taking+them+substantially+further+and+casting+them+in+the+most+negative+light%22&pg=PT252&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22had%20decided%20to%20add%20his%20personal%20interpretation%20of%20the%20intercepts%20to%20his%20rehearsed%20script%22&f=false

[5]

Tony Blair says hes sorry for Iraq War mistakes