Posted by Rex
Covert deals in that part of the world are always possible, but of course not guarunteed. A lot of things are genuine concerns, and chemical weapons is one of them, but it must be viewed in the overall context of the situation to evaluate if it is worth the potentially much larger political risk to our interests if we put a large U.S. or coalition presence on the ground. We can't afford to get tunnel vision and simply see the chemical weapon warning light.It is a lot more than a few, covert deals aren't really possible, and the concern is genuine (even if one feels it is misplaced). I don't think massive ground intervention is a terribly likely outcome, however.
Most importantly it doesn't take thousands of troops to secure facilities unless you're defending them against large conventional forces. I think the assumption is enough troops to secure the site(s) long enough to neutralize, not park thousand of troops in country indefinitely.
We consistently fail when we attempt to prevent a group from getting weapons whether small arms, IEDs, and WMD (except for a successful operation that stopped the Nazi's from getting the bomb). It is almost equivalent to stopping the flow of illegal drugs. While oversimplifying for purpose of making a point, guns don't kill people, people kill people. The same line of reasoning applies to IEDs, WMD, etc. We can't simply focus on the weapon, we need a strategy for mitigating the threat (the people that will use it), which get backs to my larger point we have to appreciate/understand the larger context or we may make the threat worse.
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