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Notes -
9/11 was a stated reason for invading Iraq, but only in an indirect way. 9/11 was treated as evidence that being reactive rather than proactive about terrorism risk was unacceptable, and from that premise even a small probability of Iraq developing serious functional WMDs was deemed to be unacceptable, because we couldn't afford to wait until "the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud", to quote the most memorable phrase.
But that's the stated reasons, and a vengeful public was not really listening closely.
"Neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or its leader to the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. Yet a sizable majority of Americans believed that Hussein aided the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives.
The same month that Congress approved the use of force resolution against Iraq, 66% of the public said that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks”; just 21% said he was not involved in 9/11."
To expand on this, and IIRC, accusations of Iraq supporting, training and equipping terrorists was part of the explicit justification for the invasion in addition to their purported WMD.
To be clear, my memory is that those accusations panned out to be 'mostly false' at best?
(not rhetorical, I actually don't remember the specifics! but that is certainly the impression that I get.)
My recollection is that they were indeed "mostly false", but it's been a long time. What makes it complicated is that once we toppled Saddam's government, neglected to replace it with anything orderly, and made little to no effort to prevent the Iraqi army's munitions stockpiles from being thoroughly looted, Iraq was subsequently completely inundated with terrorists and terrorism for the next decade-plus, so a rigorous argument would have to disentangle pre- and post-invasion terrorism.
Whatever Saddam's support for terrorism before the invasion, it seems to me that it was a rounding error compared to the amount of terrorism generated by the invasion and occupation.
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