[dv_dt]

This does not increase my confidence or trust in abstract assurances from intelligence agencies.

> In five of six incidents in which troops were wounded by chemical agents, the munitions appeared to have been designed in the United States, manufactured in Europe and filled in chemical agent production lines built in Iraq by Western companies.

[sqeaky]

I understand why that might superficially decrease you trust in the claims, but consider the perspective of the totalitarian trying to spin up a chemical weapons program. Wouldn't leveraging existing expertise and contractors be a good way to get the weapons you wanted? Why wouldn't a dictator hire outsiders to build weapons?

Having his experts check them for traps after the construction sounds much cheaper than building his own design teams.

[makomk]

We knew that Iraq had WMDs because a number of western countries sold them some a few decades ago to drop on Iran on our behalf. That's not a secret, and if I recall correctly they were tightly secured and probably degraded to the point of ineffectiveness by that point. The claim that justified invasion was that they had new chemical weapons programs, and that seems to be categorically untrue and without evidence.

[AnimalMuppet]

It's not that simple. Saddam was trying to make it look to his neighbors (especially Iran) that he had WMDs. Recall that this is very shortly after the end of the decade-long Iran-Iraq war. He wanted to be very convincing, so as to make his neighbors unwilling to oppose him.

At the same time, he was telling the US, "Who, me? I don't have any WMDs." Which made him look like a two-faced liar. The "evidence" that he wanted his neighbors to see convinced Washington.

[dv_dt]

I'm thinking at worst our intelligence agencies were intentionally looking the other way during a time period when Saddam was in favor with the US - and at best they missed it and did not stop the weapon assembly at the time...

[sqeaky]

Except we spy on our allies too.

I do think someone was "looking the other way", but I don't think it was our spy agencies.