My unanswered question about all of this is, why did we have such a bad intelligence about these weapons of mass destruction? To make the invasion legal, an imminent threat to American lives, or a plausible belief of it, was needed. White House legal council informed W he needed an imminent threat to invade, and the WMD stories started one week later. The invasion to get Saddam had nothing to do with bad intelligence.
White House legal council informed W he needed an imminent threat to invade, and the WMD stories started one week later.
The WMD stories had been ongoing for two decades. First because Iraq used them against Iran, and for the second because after the first Gulf War Iran declared them in preparation for turnover for destruction. Many were sampled and inventoried, but never turned over - and were just gone afterwards with no explanation aside from an assumption that Iraq had secretly destroyed them on their own.