I never said we invaded for that reason… I said that Iraq had produced WMDs in the past. Which was a well known fact. They also had pursued a nuclear weapons program in the past as well. This is why the falsified intelligence that lead to the 2003 invasion wasn’t farfetched… It’s not as simple as saying well it was a falsified report that led us to invade. It was bad tradecraft to assume that one Iraqi insiders report was all that was leveraged with no confirming Intel reporting of any kind from secondary sources. There was certainly also a level of political expediency that is also impossible to ignore if you are an honest person. Lots of politicians making the decision did seem to be a lot richer after that decision than before it…
But it’s nothing more than just really bad tradecraft on behalf of the Intel community. The report itself simply wasn’t farfetched enough to be dismissed as a lie.
And if you reread my original reply just a little more closely, I already said that while the poster was clearly trying to say that we entered Iraq for stupid reasons… He didn’t say that… He was implying Iraq didn’t have WMDs. Which is just purely false. They have some of the most deadly chemical weapons ever produced.
I don’t really care what you could or couldn’t find because I’m not giving you a report of something I read. I spent more than a year living in the Salah Ad Din province of Iraq. Im giving you facts as a first hand expert on this subject, you can chose to educate yourself or ignore me… It makes no difference to me either way.
I never said we invaded for that reason… I said that Iraq had produced WMDs in the past. Which was a well known fact. They also had pursued a nuclear weapons program in the past as well. This is why the falsified intelligence that lead to the 2003 invasion wasn’t farfetched… It’s not as simple as saying well it was a falsified report that led us to invade. It was bad tradecraft to assume that one Iraqi insiders report was all that was leveraged with no confirming Intel reporting of any kind from secondary sources. There was certainly also a level of political expediency that is also impossible to ignore if you are an honest person. Lots of politicians making the decision did seem to be a lot richer after that decision than before it…
But it’s nothing more than just really bad tradecraft on behalf of the Intel community. The report itself simply wasn’t farfetched enough to be dismissed as a lie.
And if you reread my original reply just a little more closely, I already said that while the poster was clearly trying to say that we entered Iraq for stupid reasons… He didn’t say that… He was implying Iraq didn’t have WMDs. Which is just purely false. They have some of the most deadly chemical weapons ever produced.
I don’t really care what you could or couldn’t find because I’m not giving you a report of something I read. I spent more than a year living in the Salah Ad Din province of Iraq. Im giving you facts as a first hand expert on this subject, you can chose to educate yourself or ignore me… It makes no difference to me either way.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/15/356360949/pentagon-reportedly-hushed-up-chemical-weapons-finds-in-iraq
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28222879
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/11/isis-chemical-biological-weapons/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/world/middleeast/isis-chemical-weapons-syria-iraq-mosul.html
https://www.chds.us/ed/resources/uploads/2010/05/2017_UAPI_Summit_Almemar_ISIS.pdf
https://public.websites.umich.edu/~graceyor/govdocs/pdf/duelfer3_bb.pdf