Jonathan Alter writes about what might happen to GIs subjected to chem/bio attacks in Iraq:

...a huge batch of gas masks turned out to be defective. After that got fixed, the Pentagon admitted that 250,000 defective [nuclear/biological/chemical] suits were unaccounted for somewhere in the system. These aren’t the first suits sent into combat but the replacements. The problem is that under a biological or chemical attack, each suit only lasts a couple of days. Which means that four or five days into a war, it’s time to play Russian roulette with the NBC suits....

The GAO found in 1996 that the United States was luckier than we knew during the first gulf war. Not only were far fewer killed and wounded than expected, but the system wasn’t prepared to handle significant casualties....

But that was then. They’ve fixed the problem, right? Lots of drills and exercises? Well, not really. A 2001 GAO report found that “no realistic field exercise of medical support for a CB [chemical-biological] attack has been concluded.” An October 2002 report found that the Pentagon was slow to respond to the lessons of the gulf war and had made few improvements since the 1996 reports, which also found medical training for treating biological and chemical attacks to be insufficient. More recently, the Pentagon simply failed to provide the GAO enough information to prove its assertions of progress in these areas....

Let me remind you that the Bush administration has been thinking seriously about going after Iraq since September 2001. That's seventeen months in which the Bushies could have seen to it that our troops are ready for whatever Saddam might unleash when we invade.