Common symptoms shared by chronic diseases

There is no silver bullet to explain or cure GWS, which is not a discreet syndrome at all but a variable cluster of symptoms and disease states with different susceptibilities. The battle to cure Gulf War illnesses must be fought at the cellular, molecular and genetic levels to try to heal the delayed wounds of war and protect future soldiers. The best evidence linking toxic causes to chronic effect lies within the bodies and minds of Gulf War veterans. That evidence has been too long ignored. 

The Butler Report, released in July 2004, strongly criticised the British government s report on Iraq s WMD. Lord Butler made it clear in the report that the claim that Iraq possessed chemical weapons ready for deployment depended on hearsay, at second-hand, from a source who turned out to be unreliable. The Butler committee concluded that they were struck by the relative thinness of the intelligence base... especially the inferential nature of much of it. 78 Downing Street saw exactly the same intelligence and yet came to the conclusion that it established beyond doubt that Iraq possessed real WMD.79 As Hans Blix observed a week before the Butler Report, the British government refused to think critically about the evidence, even when he reported that 500 searches had produced no evidence of WMD.80 

In 2001 the strategy of containment, in the form of sanctions and inspections, appeared to be working in Iraq and was certainly denying Saddam Hussein the ability to develop WMD. The switch from containment to invasion, it now seems clear, was not the result of any new 

We have seen terrorism emerge as one of the thorniest problems of the post-Cold War era. We have seen that terrorists are always searching for new weapons. It may not happen immediately, but somewhere, sometime in the future, terrorists will use or attempt to use... chemical weapons. 

In 1988 the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, described chemical weapons as the poor man s atomic bomb. 2 This phrase is as accurate as it is alarming. While many would argue that nuclear weapons represent the zenith of mass destruction, their construction requires advanced industrial capabilities as well as access to rare, tightly controlled materials. Chemical weapons, on the other hand, are comparatively cheap and easy to build using equipment and chemicals that are used extensively for a host of civilian purposes. With 

---

Table 6.4 Common symptoms shared by chronic diseases...

---