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Notes -
FWIW we did find a ton of chemical weapons, if not nukes:
Not that this was a surprise. Part of why our intelligence said Iraq had chemical weapons was because we knew they did, since we had exported them a bunch of chem precursors, missile fab equipment, and instructions on how to use them during the Iraq-Iran War. Why didn't we make more noise about it after the invasion, I'm not sure. Maybe it just looked bad on us, no nukes and a bunch of American soldiers injured from weapons that practically had Made in America stickers on them.
I'd be very interested in @2rafa's take on this, because this has become a gigantic political pet peeve for me. Even now, decades later, I hear people drop "Iraq WMDs was a lie" so casually, but I personally know veterans who were there in Iraq dealing with actual WMDs. It wasn't a fabrication; at worst, someone overstated the evidence (in much the way that people say "genocide" to imply mass murder even though technically mass relocation falls under the most widely accepted global definition of genocide). I don't even find it difficult to imagine that everyone was being honest, and the mess was just the result of inconsistent expectations surrounding words with different technical versus rhetorical meanings.
But those on the conservative side, as you note, seem disinclined to say "well, there were WMDs but they probably weren't of a kind or condition that was worth the trouble," while the progressive side has just gone right on beating the "there were no WMDs" drum. Truth is the first casualty of (culture) war.
‘Those weren’t the WMDs we were looking for’, even if you narrow the claims solely to chemical weapons. They were clearly pre-1991 stock that was no longer usable, at least in large part.
This is also why the US administration, as @Stefferi says, never pushed it too hard. It was reported upon but everyone knew it wasn’t what was meant to be found.
FWIW, the original title for my post was “Why didn't the CIA fake evidence of WMDs in Iraq, after they didn’t find (m)any?” but I edited it, I think shortly after (or possibly before) posting.
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When you go to the UN saying Saddam has "weapons of mass destruction" (already a bullshit confusionist term if you ask me), heavily hint at a nuclear program, a massive stockpile, delivery devices and a danger so imminent you have to declare war on a country that's so far away against the wishes of even some of your allies; you better come up with a lot more than old chemical weapons you (or the Germans) sold a while ago and everyone already knew about.
People feel lied to because they were lied to. Saddam was not an imminent threat. He wasn't anywhere close to North Korea, let alone a credible threat to the security of the United States. The definitions might have been successfuly cooked to the correct degree of meaninglessness, but the dishonesty is not acceptable.
When people say there were no WMDs, this is what they're saying. That it was bullshit and misleading what they did, that it was a lie. They're not really making a formal statement about whether the chemical weapons that were found are or aren't "of mass destruction".
Well, yes, but the fact that "people" do the motte-and-bailey thing constantly isn't really an excuse, to my mind. Saying things that are literally false but directionally true is something that bothers me a lot. Maybe that makes me an autist or whatever, but I am entirely comfortable that my way is better.
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Weren't those old and degraded? The article says as much.
The allegation was that Saddam had an active WMD program that would cause an acute danger to Americans - implicitly, I would say that the presumed threat wouldn't have even really included an active chemical weapons programme (chemical weapons always being the "odd man out" of the WMDs anyway, insofar as presumed effectiveness in causing mass destruction goes) - the implication was that it meant nukes or diseases, either used by Saddam or passed on to terrorists.
Nukes were definitely the much bigger concern; I bring up the chemical weapons stock discovery directly in response to the question in the OP of why we didn't discover any (we did, we just kept it under wraps).
I do think "we found 5000 chemical warheads" is more than enough for the politician who declared Victory six weeks into an eight-year war to also announce there were a whole bunch of WMDs just like we said there would be - but agreed it's nowhere near what we were promised.
The thing is, I remember hearing about these chemical weapons already in 00s, as indicated by this NBC story, for example. I think the Bush admin even used them as evidence that they weren't completely incorrect but dropped this argument fairly quickly since it was at the time evident to everyone that this was the equivalent of the police claiming some guy was running a huge Walter White style meth lab operation in the neighborhood and then doing a big raid and finding no trace of a meth lab but some evidence turning up the guy had grown a couple of weed plants in the closet when that was illegal and may have even traded it for beer with a friend a couple of times and saying this proves they were kinda right.
This. Several times this. WMD was a fake ass category invented as a piece of misinformation.
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I honestly don't remember the Admin mentioning it at the time at all (and every American I bring this up to is surprised) but I could well be wrong, and also agree the reason it wasn't hammered on is because it was embarassing compared to what Americans were promised.
Yeah, as somebody who was arguing w/ pro-Iraq War conservatives at the time, they brought stuff like the above, but then backed off, when multiple people said basically, "so, we spent billions and sent thousands of American's to die for Saddam's leftovers he didn't get to using against Iran? You guys were talking about mushroom clouds over New York."
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