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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?
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.
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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