ENDLESS WAR AS HEADLINES

The news from Nineveh and Babylon isn't so good these days.

The last major report by U.N. inspectors on the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was released about a year after the experts left in March 2003. It states that Bunker 13 contained 2,500 sarin-filled 122-mm chemical rockets produced and filled before 1991, and about 180 tons of sodium cyanide, "a very toxic chemical and a precursor for the warfare agent tabun." 

The U.N. said the bunker was bombed during the first Gulf War in February 1991, which routed Iraq from Kuwait, and the rockets were "partially destroyed or damaged." 

It said the sarin munitions were "of poor quality" and "would largely be degraded after years of storage under the conditions existing there." It said the tabun-filled containers were all treated with decontamination solution and likely no longer contain any agent, but "the residue of this decontamination would contain cyanides, which would still be a hazard." 

According to the report, Bunker 41 contained 2,000 empty 155-mm artillery shells contaminated with the chemical warfare agent mustard, 605 one-ton mustard containers with residues, and heavily contaminated construction material. It said the shells could contain mustard residues which can't be used for chemical warfare but "remain highly toxic."

Those were evidently the WMD that Saddam 'never had.'

The news from the last light of civilization in the Middle East is even less good. I can skip lightly over the news that the enemies of the race have acquired the weapons of mass destruction that everybody now swears blind Saddam didn't have, but the news at the Jerusalem Post is a scroll of rocket attacks, one after another, every day, around the clock from people and territories that have shown nothing but contempt for all the care and aid lavished on them by the West.

I think that even the Israelis are finally beginning to crack under the strain of endless attack. It sounds like they have taken the gloves off officially.  It looks like some are fed up with the endless murder.

60 years of war does interesting things to the psyche. We have all of history to look at. I sort of remember a quote from last week about how wars never last more than 30 years. To paraphrase, after 30 years of war we have killed the first and next generation interested in perpetuating war. Something seems to have gone amiss in the valley of the Jordan River. Like the Vale of Kashmir, there is such concentrated hate it perpetuates itself long after reason has fled.