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Notes -
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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