“WMDs *were* found in IRAQ. Specifically, artillery shells with chemical agents.”
Then why didn’t the Bush Administration say that they were? There’s no proof.
There’s lots of proof if you are willing to look for it. Start with researching the “Halabja Massacre “. Saddam’s Airforce disseminated VX and Sarin agents over the Kurdish Village of Halabja in an attack known as the Anfal Campaign. It was widely reported in the Western Media shortly after it happened.
They did and The NY Times ran a small story I believe...
But when a maniacal leader says he has dirty bombs, believe him.
But they did - there were photos of bunkers and the shells in question (along with chem suits and gear). The problem - they were labeled by the media as “old stock” that just didn’t get destroyed in earlier rounds of destroying chemical weapons and/or forgotten storage.
“Then why didn’t the Bush Administration say that they were? There’s no proof.”
Visibly-affected US troops appeared on American TV among many unfired shells stored in Iraqi desert sand.
The Media is complicit, as they never again presented the video evidence during WMD discussions. .
Beyond the chemical weapons they liberally used in their war with Iran.
They did...but they weren’t the masses of completely processed chemical weapons of the expected types the Iraqis declared they had, nor even the chemical weapons that were tagged and sampled by international teams in preparation for their destruction.
The question there is...where did THOSE go? The narrative given - where they don’t simply pretend they never existed -was that those known weapons supplies were secretly destroyed by the Iraqis’.
They did find a lot of dual production facilities co-located with warehouses full of precursors, and even militarily secured and fortified facilities full of barrels of ‘insecticide’ (nerve agents). They also found many, many empty barrels which had been tagged and sealed by inspectors as holding Yellowcake, but which the locals were using as (radioactive) rain barrels.
They did, however find that the expected research and production facilities had been relocated to Libya as part of a multi-national project. Libya gave them up when we invaded Iraq, and were cleared in about 6 months.
As for what I believe sauropod is referencing, there was also what fed into a 2014 article accusing the Bush administration of having hidden the finding of buried caches of chemical weapons (so that the local insurgents wouldn’t know the areas they were scattered in):
“about ‘5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs’ were found scattered across Iraqi soil. The U.S. government buried the cases from both the public and the troops. As a result, injured soldiers did not receive proper medical treatment.”