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Notes -
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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