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Notes -
One of the greatest questions of the Iraq War, and a question with significant implications for our understanding of the competence of the 'deep state', Pentagon and intelligence services in general, is this:
Why didn't the CIA fake evidence of WMDs in Iraq?
As time has passed since 2003, the 'mainstream' antiwar narrative, in which every important person supposedly 'knew' there were no WMDs but advocated for invasion anyway, has been shown to be largely ridiculous. It is likely, as discussed by Jervis and others who have done the most research into the cause of the intelligence failures in Iraq, that a substantial proportion of the intelligence establishment, including senior officials at the CIA and MI6, considered it highly likely that Saddam was, at the least, in posession of extensive chemical weapon stocks. The long since retired head of MI6 at the time said just this year that he was convinced they were there:
They weren't united about what to do, hence certain Cheney actions, and they didn't have much proof, thus the Office of Special Plans and intense efforts to convince Powell etc to act, but even many of those who didn't advocate invasion believed it was likely that he had these weapons. Most crucially, as Jervis argues, they overfocused on Saddam's refusal to allow international weapons inspectors as almost a guarantee that he was hiding WMDs, because why else would he refuse them? (Saddam ultimately claimed, under interrogation in 2004, that he refused to allow them because he didn't want Iran to find out how 'degraded' his weapon stocks were.)
So why, after it became clear weeks - and certainly months - into the invasion that there were no WMDs, did the US 'deep state' (including the intelligence services, perhaps with Pentagon assistance and/or with WH approval) not fake them? This anti-conspiracy is critically important for a few reasons:
It would likely have been significantly easier to fake chemical and/or biological weapon stocks in Iraq than to commit many of the other conspiracies placed at the foot of Western Intelligence services or the 'deep state'. The US didn't destroy its own chemical weapon stocks until 2022, and anthrax would be a trivial process for a small, highly focused internal intelligence unit to acquire or manufacture. No 'Bush planned 9/11' tier conspiracy theory is required, this would have been a focused, limited program in the vein of countless mid-late 20th century US intelligence operations involving a small number of operatives. While the coalition alleged variably the existence of (official link) chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the nuclear allegations were extremely vague and largely amounted to the idea that Iraq 'might' have started such a program, or that Saddam had 'met with' nuclear scientists or tried to acquire nuclear material.
It was not, therefore, necessary to manufacture the presence of nuclear weapons or nuclear material, for which a longer, riskier and more complex supply chain would be necessary. The presence of moderate stocks of chemical weapons, plus some anthrax, would have been sufficient to make the pre-war claims largely accurate, or at least accurate enough to be respectable.
It's unlikely the international press would have trusted the denials of ex-Baathist officials or scientists around planted evidence, and in the event of requiring an eyewitness, only a few people would had to have been paid. Even if the fakes weren't universally believed, they would have sowed enough FUD that US motives for the war wouldn't have been thoroughly discredited. There was no need to 'prove' the full extent of the pre-war allegations, only to lend them broad credence. 'There were no WMDs in Iraq' served as a major argument used by people hostile to the policies of the Bush and Blair administrations after 2003, led to major protests and enquiries, and soured the popular perception of those governments extensively.
The Iraq War led to a climate in which CIA regime change operations supported by boots-on-the-ground became substantially less easy to slip through the political process. Even if we assume that (a) the CIA was ambivalent about an invasion, thus the OSP and (b) that the CIA didn't particularly care to prop up the careers of neoconservative politicians who suffered if they didn't find WMDs, the number of US regime change ops, and the number of direct military interventions involving ground soldiers, have declined significantly since 2003, even relative to the 1990s. Military involvement was (beyond those existing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan) limited to Syria, Libya and some support for Yemen and Ukraine, civil involvement to Ukraine and a couple of others, and the Iraq War's intelligence failures have led to a political climate in which committing ground soldiers to foreign conflicts is extremely unpopular. The presence of WMDs would have made all this significantly easier. For example, the CIA's failed rebel training program in Syria was in part a consequence of the US' steadfast refusal under Obama and Trump to support their regime change operation with a substantial number of ground forces.
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What do you think?
You seem to assume that the CIA actually wants this — that it is them, rather than politicians or the military, pushing for "boots on the ground."
I believe it was Jim Donald who, in speaking of rivalry between the State Department and the Defense Department, coined the phrases "blue empire of the consulates" and "red empire of the bases." He is far from alone in arguing that for Foggy Bottom, the foreign "enemy," — Al Qaeda, Saddam, the Taliban — is not the outgroup, but a fargroup, and their actual outgroup is the Pentagon. And now, I consider the connection between spies working overseas and embassies — how often the latter host and provide "diplomatic cover" for the former, and such. Thus, is it really inconceivable, then, that college-educated Langley boys might tend to prefer Foggy Bottom over the Pentagon, and thus not really want a bunch of uniformed rednecks trampling all over "their turf"? Particularly when, for the more military-friendly would-be spooks, there's the DIA to join instead of the CIA. That could add some selection effects into the mix as well.
(And now I'm reminded — yes, yes, fictional evidence — of multiple movies where the protagonists are some flavor of military special operations or such, and the villain is some shady CIA spook trying to screw them over for his own ends.)
I'm saying take this, and add the DoD on there as another target.
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It's difficult to fake a nuclear program. Nerve gas is one thing, ultracentrifuges or gaseous diffusion enrichment equipment is quite another. These are very heavy, technically complex, rare and well-controlled objects with a whole ecosystem of infrastructure surrounding them. The US would need to fake up a whole facility, workers, scientists and infrastructure. That would be a risky operation, rather like trying to fake an entire mid-size chemicals company.
And they'd need to deceive the UN inspectors who'd just shown up, checked and found no nuclear weapons or nuclear facilities!
The CIA isn't that powerful, they're not reality-warpers.
Anyway, the Iraq war was never about WMDs or nuclear weapons, it was about wiping out enemies of the neocons. 'WMDs' was a deliberately ambiguous term, chosen because it could fit a motte 'chemical weapons' and a bailey 'thermonuclear bombs with ballistic missiles'. They fluff up the bailey and then retreat to the motte later on.
Iraq had some chemical weapons - who cares? They're unpleasant but not on the same level as hydrogen bombs in destructive power.
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This takes me back to 8th November 2002 and Security Council Resolution 1441
The remarkable bit is in section 5
Basically, UNMOVIC gets to whisk the Iraqis who know, out of Iraq, and their families too, so that they can spill the beans without having to worry about going back to Iraq or about how to get their families out.
I tried to guess what would happen next. Once Saddam's own experts were outside Iraq, and their families were outside Iraq, they would be able to speak freely. What would they say?
Perhaps they would say that Iraq did indeed have forbidden weapons and say where they were hidden.
Perhaps they would explain how weird and corrupt it all was. There was money allocated to the Mustard Gas budget, but it was "stolen" to build a palace. It is no use looking for Mustard Gas, there isn't any. The Mustard Gas budget is just there to fake out the Iranians. (The CIA believed it too!)
I admitted to myself that I just didn't know and went 50:50.
Notice that I managed to be 100% wrong. Saddam never complied with 1441. UNMOVIC never got to talk to Iraq's weapons experts outside of Iraq. And that refusal to obey 1441 was the legal basis of the war.
We all remember how it looked to hoi polloi. Weapons of Mass Destruction. We must invade before they can be used against us. Panic! War!
But insiders, steeped in the minutiae of UN Security Council Resolutions probably had a different take. What if the weapons are not found? What if the weapons were never there? Do they get into trouble for starting a war on lies? No.
Technically they were not actually claiming to know for sure. They were claiming the right to find out for sure. Saddam was playing a game of "I've handed over all the weapons. I've dragged my feet and obstructed the inspectors for so long that no-one feels really sure, but don't worry, that is only to frighten the Iranians. Honest!". And 1441 gives UNMOVIC the right to question the relevant Iraqi officials when they and their families are safely outside of Iraq. I wonder what would have happened if Saddam had let the officials and their families leave, and their testimony had been that the weapons were all gone.
I suspect that there was a double game being played. Saddam knew that the weapons were gone. If he could get the UN to accept that the weapons were gone and leave, then his experts could start manufacturing again, and he could recreate what he had lost. Perhaps not immediately, but if he got into another war with Iran and needed them again. But it all depended on retaining his experts. Once UNMOVIC had moved them and their families to the USA, Saddam wasn't getting them back. So maybe the point of 1441 was that the US knew he didn't actually have the weapons any more and the plan was to steal away his experts so that he couldn't recreate them in the future.
But why would insiders feel the need to fake weapons of mass destruction? They were following the legal technicalities and knew that the formal resolution was only that Saddam had to stop playing around and let them find out about the weapons for sure. And if Saddam continued to play around and got invaded, then the US would find out about the weapons for sure. All nice and legal, even if it turned out that there are no weapons any more.
Even at the time, most people following politics had no interest in the clever maneuvering of section 5 of 1441. But I'm guessing that it mattered to insiders. Legally, they were in the clear, even if no weapons were found. So faking it is double bad. First, they might get caught. Second, faking it admits that they are at fault if the weapons are not there; which is silly, because they have won the bureaucratic battle and it is technically Saddam at fault for not surrendering his experts.
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Who'd have thought there would be a new, interesting idea about a topic as tired as the Iraq War. Kudos, sincerely.
I question both that the CIA does the type of long term planning about reduced operational flexibility (so, they didn't care) and also that Iraq (or, more precisely, the lack of finding meaningful WMD in Iraq) constrained later activity. A faked WMD cache would barely have nudged domestic or international opinion: it was the piling up bodies and dollars that made people domestically turn against it, not the accuracy of WMD claims, which were more or less apparent a couple weeks after the invasion, to general shrugging.
I'd attribute the CIA's increasing operational reluctance to a more general trend of institutions becoming more hidebound and risk averse as time goes on. You exist to push papers around, not to change the material world in any way. Why bother to throw a coup or kill Epstein or anything, when it doesn't get you much of anything except exposing you to the risk of losing your organizational fiefdom?
(This is why I don't put much stock into contemporary conspiracy theories either.)
I’m not sure how true that is. It’s similar to the argument that the Afghan War would have been equally unpopular if bin Laden had been captured in Afghanistan in like 2004. It might have been eventually, sure, but one of the core reasons the public’s perception of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is so poor is that some of the primary war objectives were never reached. If you take it to the most extreme extent, if the US had found, say, almost ready nukes in Iraq, the war narrative would have been “we stayed too long”, not “we shouldn’t have gone”. That’s a huge difference.
That said, I mostly otherwise agree with you.
The difference is that public opinion of the Iraq War was never really based on the presence or absence of WMDs. I don't know how old you were in the run up to the war in 2002/early 2003, but this was never really a huge selling point among the American public. It was the official justification, and it was the one Colin Powell pushed in front of the UN, but I don't remember anyone who really felt like that was the best justification. Most of the people who would fervently denounce the war later were denouncing it before it even started. Most of the people in favor of the war were pushing some muddled narrative about how since Sadaam was a bad, anti-American Arab actor in the Middle East he was somehow responsible for terrorist activity including 9/11. They all mentioned the WMD angle when they were arguing in favor of the war before it actually happened, but few of them flinched when the evidence turned out to be underwhelming. And lest you think that there was some middle ground where pro-war Democrats lost faith in the war after they saw how flimsy the initial justification was, they didn't exactly back off right away. Even the 2004 election, largely viewed as a referendum on the war at the time, didn't really have any war-related policy angle. John Kerry had no plans on withdrawing and didn't claim that he did. He claimed that it was a mistake in retrospect but that didn't translate into any concrete proposals.
What happened was that the people who had always been opposed to the war started pointing to the lack of WMDs as proof that it was built on a faulty foundation, and as the years went by this narrative became more prominent. The real problem with the Iraq War was the unexpected insurgency and inability to deal with the sectarian tensions that bubbled to the surface in Sadaam's absence. The problem with the war in 2004 was that a year on from Bush proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" the war continued to drag on with no real end in sight. If the US had gone in in 2003 and installed an effective government the no one would really care about the lack of WMDs. The outcome would have been used as an object lesson that most of the unfree people in the world simply desire democracy and the US military can make their dreams come true by simple removing whatever impediments are preventing it. Afghanistan had already started to shatter that illusion, but it was easy to gloss over Afghanistan because it had been relatively anarchic to begin with and was considered absolutely necessary by pretty much everybody, given that they were responsible for an attack on our country. Iraq was seen as optional. There's also the fact that casualties were much higher in Iraq; annual casualties in Afghanistan measured in the tens, while casualties in Iraq measured in the thousands. These casualties were also higher in the insurgency than they were during the initial invasion. Even accounting for the fact that there was a good 2 1/2 months of 2003 before any action started, 2004 saw by far the highest casualty totals of the war. There were fewer than 3,000 total casualties in 2003; in 2004 there were over 8,000, and the following 3 years would see casualties in the 5,000–7,000 range. The totals plummeted in 2008, but by this time even the war's former supporters had to distance themselves from it. There was no doubt that whoever the Democratic candidate was would have to unequivocally commit to ending the war in his (or her) first term, and John McCain's support of the war (he was actually one of the few people in government who advocated for sending more troops to Iraq) was viewed as a major impediment to his electability.
The general, but the Democratic primaries were dominated by the question. Howard Dean's raison d'etre was opposition to the war.
In the end, though, the majority of Democrats shrugged, and John Kerry got the nomination. And his position was, at best, muddled, sometimes calling for withdrawal early in the new term, sometimes suggesting increased troop presence. (You actually can come up with a coherent statement of his position beyond "Bush bad," but it's clearly synthetic and mostly because he was very reticent when it came to committing to any particular concrete policy.) And, in fairness to the politics at the time, him adopting a strong anti-war stance would have probably lost him votes; his issue was waffling badly, not waffling itself.
Yep, that's me. And to add a bit of color, although I would tactically deploy arguments about WMD when convenient, in all honesty I didn't give a shit: finding anything short of a nuke wouldn't have phased me, and even with a nuke I would have probably just gone quiet for a month. I still think that's the correct perspective, but the matter of WMD was just a pretextual battlefield for the larger question of whether the war on Iraq was good or bad. And I'm pretty sure that's not unique to me.
You mean "fazed". The way you spelled it is a hypercorrection.
Good catch, appreciated.
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I voted for Bush in 2000, and one of my biggest reasons for supporting him was when he explicitly disavowed nation-building. 9/11 and the explicit arguments that Saddam was an imminent threat was enough to shift me out of my isolationist position. The subsequent walk-back on WMD infuriated me beyond belief, and led to me going hard-blue for the next decade and change, to the point that I left the country for a couple years.
Certainly I'm not the majority, but there has always been a significant isolationist position within the Red Tribe, and they were not okay with the Forever Wars or the lies told to secure them.
See also Pat Buchanan.
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Why on earth are you modeling the CIA as a unified, rational agent?
The question is: what individuals inside the CIA would personally have the incentive or motive to organize a conspiracy to fake the WMD? Seems like there would be very little upside to any individual, and quite a bit of downside (if you try to induct into your conspiracy someone who then spills the beans and gets everyone in big trouble).
I agree with you, my point is that this also challenges a lot of more conventional CIA conspiracy theories by political radicals, since it suggests an organization constrained by relatively banal norms and ultimately unwilling (for reasons you describe) to take risky action in support of the temporal politics of a particular US administration.
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I think the idea that this is a puzzle, like so much political discourse, is based on a failure to listen to what people say about their beliefs and motives and then believe them. If you're going to keep a secret, you need strong agreement among the people who know about it. People who work for the CIA generally want to help the U.S. and beat the bad guys, not deceive the American people in order to preserve the CIAs "operational reach". People may have hidden motives, but groups rarely do, since new members will be people who believed the public messaging. If they do something to interfere in U.S. domestic politics it'll be because they genuinely believe it is aligned with their mission, like if there's widespread agreement that left-wing radicals are Soviet subversives. Or if they were the next organization to suffer enough SJW institutional capture to decide that the next Republican presidential candidate is a "white-supremacist" who needs to be kept away from power at all costs. Or if they bought into some media narrative and, for instance, think Incel is a terrorist organization. But they aren't going to do that sort of thing for the sake of the CIA itself, their loyalty is to what their worldview says is in the interest of America and/or their sense of morality.
You can often get CIA members to keep a secret against a clear enemy, you can maybe even get the NSA to keep a secret like "using PRISM to scan all internet metadata in the U.S. in order to catch terrorists", though of course that one ultimately leaked. But once you're doing something that members don't view as a natural extension of the CIA's public mission, people aren't going to try doing it and they will probably have whistleblowers if they do. The same is true for the politicians who could have potentially tried (and probably failed) to order the CIA to commit such a deception. Bush claimed Saddam had WMDs (beyond old unusable remnants) because he was biased enough to believe it was true based off the weak and ambiguous evidence, not because he deliberately lied, so why would he suddenly start orchestrating a giant lie after he turned out to be wrong?
The problem with this is that by its very nature, there aren't very many things that you can't justify as being required to achieve the CIA's public mission.
Torture, kidnapping, human experimentation, drug trafficking, they did all that and every time there was a good excuse because their very purview is doing the shady wetwork nobody can be seen doing.
If CIA officials can convince themselves that Operation Northwoods is justified and we only learned about it through declassification, what makes you think they can't convince themselves to fake some evidence? They've been ready to blow up Americans by the truckload to justify wars before.
It can justify a lot of things, but there does need to be some justification that those involved find convincing. Operation Northwoods, for example, was a proposal from the DoD to start a war and thus attain a specific geopolitical goal, rather than justify one that has already occurred. It also drew justification from the greater importance of the Cold War. To justify faking WMDs after Saddam was already overthrown you have to think about it in terms of long-term PR concerns, there isn't any immediate goal. That's enough of a difference to explain why one would be proposed but not the other. (Of course, even if it had been proposed, we wouldn't necessarily know if Bush rejected the idea. I'm inclined to think that it wasn't even a proposal though.)
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I think this undersells how much of the emphasis on WMDs was on nuclear weapons, specifically. As other commenters have pointed out we did find large stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq. The problem with using chemical weapons as a justification for invasion is that (1) lots of countries (including the US) had large chemical weapons stockpiles at the time and (2) chemical weapons are not actually that effective. I think there was much more focus on nuclear weapons than other categories of WMD due to the idea of Iraq giving terrorists sufficient material to make a dirty bomb or similar. As you note, manufacturing some kind of plausible trail or stockpile of nuclear weapons or fissile material is much harder than doing so for chemical weapons.
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I think your ‘didn’t care’ theory holds more water than you’re willing to admit, because the CIA didn’t expect Iraq to turn into a decade long civil war that would humiliate them. The CIA expected to put a pliant government in place that would control the country and ‘no wmd’s found’ would be a page 5 story at best. That’s not what happened, obviously.
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Haven't read the replies yet, but I'd like to point out that your incompetence theory holds water again if there are factions within CIA with differing capabilities. My glance over Legacy of Ashes suggests that the analysis/research and operations groups are culturally quite distinct centrally, meaning de-facto siloed. Only the analysis/research groups are at risk if the WMD claim is revealed to be bogus, and only the ops groups are able to convincingly plant evidence in the field. Shit rolls downhill onto the specialist team evaluating WMD risk in MENA/AFRICOM, skipping the chain of command above them, so there's no incentive for a figure to arise who can make a market to resolve in bridging them.
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I think they wanted to manufacture consent for the Iraq War but they just weren't able to. A significant percent of the elite, including sizeable minorities in Congress were strongly against the war. And while they did get a few outlets such as the New York Times to play ball, many other media sources were skeptical of the war from the very beginning. Importantly, opposition to the war was never deemed "out of bounds". It was nearly always in the "reasonable people can have disagreements" camp.
I'd contrast that with the response to Covid, where nearly all opposition was effectively marginalized. Arguments against the Covid lockdowns were banned from elite discourse. This lack of a strong opposition allowed government bodies to run roughshod over the truth and human rights.
But, had the CIA faked evidence in Iraq, there was a sizeable chunk of the elite that would have doubted and investigated this behavior. Whistleblowers would appear, and unlike Snowden or Assange, would be sainted and protected. A temporary 65% majority of elite opinion is not enough to make it a good career move to fake evidence. Especially as the occupation turned against the U.S. and its popularity began to plummet.
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The WMD hoax was engineered by Zionists in the American government under the newly-formulated Office of Special Plans, specifically as a workaround to slush fabricated intelligence from Israel to the Pentagon, working around the CIA. The goal was to formulate a propaganda narrative to instigate the United States into fighting a regional rival of Israel, Saddam Hussein.
Douglas Feith Himself, along with Richard Perle, another architect of the Iraq war, authored the Clean Break Memo.
The Clean Break memo was a policy document created by Feith, Perle, and Netenyahu:
From the memo:
So the authors of this memo, in collaboration with Netenyahu, use their influence in the highest positions of American government to fabricate intelligence for WMDs (and also intelligence that Iraq was responsible for the post-9/11 Anthtrax attack which seems to be a memory-holed event in the context of 9/11. Israeli intelligence distributed the claim that Anthrax was given to a hijacker by an Iraqi spy in Prague, which was discounted by American intelligence agencies including the CIA but still became part of the WMD narrative leading up to the war.).
So to answer your question:
The WMD hoax was fabricated by Zionists, who formed special working groups and offices to slush false intelligence around the CIA. The CIA is not chiefly responsible for the WMD hoax or the Iraq/Al-Qaeda in Praque anthrax hoax, and was critical of the OSP and the intelligence provided by the OSP. The CIA did not have an incentive to fabricate evidence for a deception campaign that was not of their own making.
The OSP was not in a position to fabricate the evidence for WMDs on the ground, nor was that ever its goal. Its goal was to get America involved in a war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam on behalf of the sate of Israel, and it succeeded. Fabricating physical evidence for WMDs was not necessary for their goals, or even for their coverup. The leading theories for why America was manipulated into the Iraq War surround Bush's neuroses and Big Oil conspiracies. So fabricating physical evidence was not necessary for them to accomplish their goals or even to get away with their crimes.
There were some attempts to forge a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A big question is, who forged the Habbush Letter? I don't think it was the CIA.
Well, as your source itself says, Israel’s priorities were Iran and Syria, with Iraq a distant third place. And I’m not sure your explanation actually affects my question. The CIA was still less able to get regime change opps off the ground (including beyond the ME) after Iraq; and (as the interview with the ex-head of MI6 surely suggests) many legitimate intelligence personnel strongly believed the WMDs existed even where they had objections to an invasion. Jervis and the BBC both note that it was considered fringe in intelligence circles to believe that Saddam didn’t have WMDs, especially after he refused the inspectors.
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Single-issue posting is officially against the rules. Your cooldown on "Jews did it" arguments has not adequately expired, so I'm banning you for three days.
His reply was about as expected as the sun rising tomorrow, so there’s no need, really.
2rafa, if my reply was so expected then why does your post demonstrate a lack of understanding of the dynamic between the OSP, Bush Administration, and CIA/intelligence apparatus? The genuine confusion among the CIA and intelligence apparatus is not evidence of a non-conspiracy, it's the consequence of having traitors with loyalty to a foreign ethnostate having such influence at the highest levels of foreign policy and intelligence.
By characterizing the OSP as little more than a couple PNAC lackeys pushing for war woefully mischaracterizes the reality of the situation. Maybe some in the CIA believed the WMD narrative, but the primary question is from whence did the WMD narrative actually come? Since I've explained this to you a few times by now, maybe I'll just leave it to The Guardian to paint a clearer picture:
I think it's a little to ridiculous, in this context, to conclude that the CIA's deferral from fabricating physical evidence for WMDs is evidence of a non-conspiracy. The confusion sown by the Zionist influence in our foreign policy apparatus was genuine, but the confusion is not evidence of a non-conspiracy, it was itself the outcome of a conspiracy.
It's ridiculous to even call it a "conspiracy theory": the Zionists who got together in secret and wrote a memo creating some plans, which included overthrowing Hussein, and then the very same people go and carry out those plans... well that's a conspiracy theory. No, it's just called Narrative Control, it's icky to relate this all to Zionist influence, you will get banned for it even in free-speech forums. You are supposed to talk about Bush family vendettas or Big Oil, it's low-status to identify the Zionists who actually got together in a room to write down plans to do something, and then they went and did that thing.
And in any case, contrary to the CIA which retained skepticism of the intelligence linking WMDs or Al-Qaeda to Iraq, Israel was fabricating intelligence, including the claim that an Iraqi spy gave a 9/11 hijacker Antrhax while in Prague (what's the "non-conspiratorial" explanation for this false story becoming a casus belli for the WMD narrative and Iraq war??).
And it was Israeli sources which were the source of the "the WMDs were real, but they were moved to Syria so you should, uh you know, Spread More Democracy when you get the chance.":
Our "greatest ally", folks.
The main thing you don't understand is that among all these issues the physical evidence matters the least of all, narrative control is far more important. Fabricating intelligence, sowing confusion, making it low-status for people to directly identify the behavior of groups of people who are acting on a deep loyalty to a foreign ethnostate... that's how it works.
The reason we haven't gone to war with Iran (yet) is because of how disastrous the wars actually were on the ground. The lack of evidence for WMDs is not the primary reason for it. The lack of evidence for WMDs, what that actually does, is expose the behaviors of Zionists in the American foreign policy apparatus, but as you yourself show, this doesn't matter either because as long as you control the narrative and make it low status to say "hey look, those people got together to plan to do something and then they went and did that thing" you are going to get away with it regardless of something so unimportant as the physical evidence.
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I think that for once the CIA was being honest, or at least the various intelligence services involved. There's a large step from "We think he probably does have something" to "He definitely has weapons of mass destruction". It seems to have been the politicians who were pushing for "tell us that yes it's true so we can stand up in parliament and declare war".
So I think the push for war came from the politicians and certain parties within the intelligence services, who wanted something to back them up, and once they got the go-ahead for war and the subsequent invasion/liberation (delete as applicable) of Iraq, actually finding the weapons was no longer a priority. They could now move on to claims of removing a tyrant and nation building and so forth.
The 'sources' relied upon for intel seem to have been sketchy, to say the least, and this was probably embarrassing to the agencies involved. Going ahead with planting fake weapons would have meant a public (amongst themselves and their political masters) admission that they had been fooled, and left them open to rebuke by the governments involved that "But you told us there really were WMD, what do you mean there aren't any?". It would also have meant that, intentional or not, they would have been demonstrating that their bosses in the government were liars. More trouble than it was worth to start up fakery. If, on the other hand, the intelligence agencies had been the ones pushing, then I think it would have been worth their while to fake WMDs, but not when the push came from the other way round.
Take the Dodgy Dossier:
Not everybody was on board with the alleged intel even within the intelligence services, so I think this is why there was no united effort to fake up WMD. The Chilcot Report was scathing of pretty much everyone and everything involved, but stopped short of saying anyone was deliberately lying:
It's difficult enough to disagree with the minister about the rationale for war, it's even worse if afterwards you have to tell him "So the intel was all lies, you're a fool for believing it, and now you have to give us permission to create fake WMDs we can show to the press, even though this is likely to create a trail that can be discovered by any investigative journalists willing to put the work in, and if discovered will convince everyone that we're a bunch of incompetent lying fools".
This sounds ridiculous, but given politicians arguably paid the most substantial price for the Iraq-was-a-disaster narrative, it seems less likely they’d be the brake on that kind of scheme from Dearlove types.
By the way (as is hopefully obvious), I don’t believe any of this, I just think that as a logical exercise it suggests Western intelligence agencies are much less competent than most people on the political extremes often suggest.
There's always "If Minister Jones ignored your advice and rushed to war on fake or dubious intel, why should you dig him out of the hole later (by faking up WMDs)? Let him be scapegoated in public, and his successor - hopefully - will listen more closely to you".
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I'm actually not sure that's the important point here. There was infact sufficient WMD materials to make the claim that, yep, we did in fact find WMDs (links: 550 metric tons of Yellowcake Uranium, thousands of US troops injured from chemical weapon cleanup, weapons captured by ISIS, as referenced in this Reddit comment). Granted, it wasn't a pile of shiny, new, ready to fire gas shells and bombs, but it seems to me it was enough to support a claim. So the question becomes, why did the media narrative become "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever"? Perhaps the CIA etc could have faked more evidence, but exactly what evidence could they have faked that would plausibly change the narrative? It would certainly have to be at least better than what they actually did find. Or did the Mainstream Media decide in advance on the "definitely totally no WMDs whatsoever" narrative and interpret all evidence in favor of reporting that line.
I also think the lack of enthusiasm for future such adventures are more down to how totally bungled the aftermath was. The administration narrative pre-war was that the Iraqis all couldn't wait to be a peaceful stable Democracy, all we had to do was bump off Saddam's regime. If that had turned out to be actually true and Iraq was a nice stable democracy in 2004, I don't think anybody would care much to what extent the WMDs claim was actually true or reasonable believable at the time. The reluctance now is IMO more due to the fact that Saddam was actually keeping a lid on a bunch of millennia-old religious and tribal beefs that promptly blew up in our faces and we didn't have the slightest clue how to handle, and it took a decade and tremendous amounts of blood and treasure to get things sort of kind of stable. Who wants to repeat that?
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Wouldn’t faking a chemical weapons trove require the participation or passive consent of the other countries involve in the invasion (Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, Great Britain)? Then you have the issue of the hundreds of personnel involved in hauling the chemical weapons to a location that is a hotbed for IEDs (up to 100 IED attacks a day), which would pose such enormous risk that it would require even more personnel involved in supporting the operation (aerial reconnaissance and large troop movements). Lastly, I think you would need to convince thr third party inspectors that the chemical weapons were indeed Iraqi, which may not be easy because per leaked UN emails they had difficulty being convinced that Assad used poison gas during the Syrian conflict.
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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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Which conspiracy theories does this make unlikely? Quite a few of the relevant CIA conspiracies are either firmly established or even outright declassified. If you're think of something like old school MK Ultra or JFK assassination conspiracies, these are dealing with a CIA from two generations earlier and an information ecosystem that differs sharply from what exists this side of the millennium. If the intelligence agencies simply thought they were correct in their assessment and turned out not to be, it makes sense to me that the assessment at that point would be that any effort to fake it risks more damage than just accepting being wrong. Yeah, this probably does rule out some sort of all-powerful CIA cabal that can masterfully manipulate any part of global politics that it chooses, swapping it out for a powerful intelligence agency with a demonstrated willingness to act brutally when they think it's needed, but with standard realpolitik motivations.
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