The entire Al Muthanna mega-facility was the bastion of Iraqi’s chemical weapons development program. During its peak in the late 1980s to early 1990s, it amassed mega-bunkers full of chemical munitions, and provided Iraq with a force multiplier sufficient to counteract Iran’s superior military numbers. Two wars, sanctions and UNSCOM oversight reduced Iraqi’s premier production facility to a stockpile of old damaged and contaminated chemical munitions(sealed in bunkers), a wasteland full of destroyed chemical munitions, razed structures, and unusable war-ravaged facilities. In 1998 Al Tariq State Establishment took over all remaining remnants at Al Muthanna.

Conservatives will argue Bush was right all along. But he wasn't. There was no active weapons plant in Iraq. The New York Times says:

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.

What they found during 2004 to 2010, was a place where old, mostly degraded weapons, built in large part by U.S. companies. They had been used in the 1980's and 90's in Iraq's war with Iran.

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.

As Time puts it:

U.S. troops did not find plants producing weapons of mass destruction. But troops found something else: abandoned plants still stocked with chemical weapons made in the 1980s, during the Iraq-Iran war.

The NY Times:

In a letter sent to the United Nations this summer, the Iraqi government said that about 2,500 corroded chemical rockets remained on the grounds, and that Iraqi officials had witnessed intruders looting equipment before militants shut down the surveillance cameras.

... the CW will not be in a state in which it can be loaded into rockets or artillery pieces, so we don’t expect Baghdad to be under threat immediately. But they could use improvised delivery methods such as IEDs, and Al Qaeda has used mustard shells in Iraq in the past in this manner. The key concern is that ISIS has seen the effect Assad’s use of CW in Syria, and it might consider similar use, especially if things start to go badly in Iraq.

I feel badly for any U.S. soldiers that were unexpectedly exposed to it and suffered and continue to suffer symptoms. I am not even remotely concerned that ISIS will be able to reconstitute the weapons (As bashad apparently has) and use them against the West.

I'd like to see the U.S. explain this:

[T]he munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.

Easy enough solution: Ban western countries from further design of chemical weapons in the Middle East and get the European countries to cease manufacturing new ones.

Bashad has been using chemical weapons for years. Whose job was it to destroy the decrepit weapons? Iraq'.

Finding, safeguarding and destroying these weapons was to be the responsibility of Iraq’s government. Iraq took initial steps to fulfill its obligations.

Iraq drafted a plan to entomb them in concrete. Iraq never followed through.

When three journalists from The Times visited Al Muthanna in 2013, a knot of Iraqi police officers and soldiers guarded the entrance. Two contaminated bunkers — one containing cyanide precursors and old sarin rockets — loomed behind. The area where Marines had found mustard shells in 2008 was out of sight, shielded by scrub and shimmering heat.

Back in June, it was widely reported ISIS had seized the plant.

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki added, though, that the facility does not appear to hold usable chemical weapons, "and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials."

The site contains dilapidated chemical arms inside two airtight storage chambers that extremists had yet to enter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Armed-forces insiders said the United States would have eliminated the materials had they been usable in attacks.

"The only people who would likely be harmed by these chemical materials would be the people who tried to use or move them," one of the sources said.

In June, when ISIS took over the Muthanna plant, and then attacked the the Iraqi Military base in Saddiqua, it was widely reported they may have used some kind of chemical weapon like chlorine on the soldiers. The U.S. responded:

Spokeswoman Jen Psaki added, though, that the facility does not appear to hold usable chemical weapons, "and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to safely move the materials."

The site contains dilapidated chemical arms inside two airtight storage chambers that extremists had yet to enter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. Armed-forces insiders said the United States would have eliminated the materials had they been usable in attacks.

"The only people who would likely be harmed by these chemical materials would be the people who tried to use or move them," one of the sources said.

ISIS doesn't need the gas. It has high tech advanced weapons, courtesy of the U.S. It can put the gas into IED's and makeshift bombs, but not use them as rockets, according to the articles. Bashad, on the other hand, uses them routinely and indiscriminately, including on children.

The republishing of this months old news is not a reason for sending ground troops to Iraq. This is Iraq's problem, let them handle it. Or not. It doesn't change my mind that we should not be entering another war costing billions of dollars that will only result in the loss of more lives -- American lives. The only groups who can beat ISIS are their competitors. In time, they will cancel each other out through their infighting. I'm happy to wait until that happens. We will not defeat ISIS. All our intervention will do is make their enemies side with them and against us. Providing arms and training to the Syria rebels is like playing russian roulette. Let ISIS have its caliphate state in Iraq and Syria. Or let Turkey and the other big countries in the region put up their troops and dollars. This just isn't our fight.