Christopher Shays Quotes
What we know from World War I is that some of our troops had acute symptoms of exposure to chemicals, had bad health and died because of chemical exposure in World War I.
Shays, Christopher. "Interview: Rep. Christopher Shays." Frontline: Last Battle of the Gulf War, PBS, 20 Jan. 1998.
Almost every use of war weapons of mass destruction in history have been justified with the rationale that the total casualties would be reduced. It sometimes has been such as with the use of the atomic bomb in WWII but usually it has not. The same argument was made incidentally by Dr. Gattling, the inventor of the machine gun. In WWI far more men were killed by machine gun fire than poison gas.
This was true at the time, but WWI which was to come in a year would be the first major war where that was not true. Since then medicine in general and military medicine in particular has kept the incapacitation due to disease much lower than the causalities of battle.
This information was proven false after the invasion of Iraq. The British were persuaded it was true because the US intelligence had reached the same conclusions. And the Americans were much more confident that Saddam was actively producing WMDs because British intelligence said so. In reality, both intelligence agencies relied on the same set of false information to reach this conclusion. There was no Iraq nuclear program and no chemical or biological weapons production either. The major British-American reason for initiating the Iraq war was without foundation. It is still debated whether it was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration and the American neo conservatives or just bad intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Churchill saw before many others that technology and weaponry had changed the nature of warfare. At the time the military leadership of all the major powers were pursuing 19th century tactics with 20th century weaponry including mass bayonet charges against machine guns behind barbed wire. Churchill and other civilians, although they had legal control over the military, had little de facto tactical control. As a politician he became an itinerant meddler in military tactics thereafter.
He was the Secretary of State in the War Office at the time. The Royal Air Force had suggested an experiment---gassing “recalcitrant Arabs” from the air. This predated Sadaam Hussein's gassing of Hussein's gassing of his own people by over 70 years.
See {77473} for evidence of German war crimes.
The General was experimenting with LSD and other substances that would cause major mental effects to be used as a weapon. This was before the ban on chemical warfare.
Although an ordained Methodist Minister, the Methodist Episcopal Church refused to allow her to preach.
Even in democratic America, this has been true. We spend almost any amount of money to give our military the weapons of war that will make them more effective soldiers, but when they return with mental and physical wounds, government money is not so easy to come by to preserve them in good health. Cost is a major consideration in Veterans benefits and care, but weapons expenditures have little restraint. It has been so for many years in many cultures.
His view is that none of the objectives of the counties fighting the war achieved their war aims. Even those who thought that they had solved the problem of German aggression were proven wrong by the Second World War.
Christopher Hunter Shays is an American politician. He was a member of the United States House of Representatives and represented the 4th District of Connecticut. He is a member of the Republican Party.
