Well this is false. Saddam has chemical weapons, even the NYT has an article over soldiers hurt by them when they had to hide that they were finding them.
Secret removal of tons of yellowcake (uranium) to Canada if I remember correctly, was pretty well known.
The problem though wasn’t any WMD, it’s that the Muslim world needs harsh dictators like Saddam to keep them in line. Without him, the gap was quickly filled with even worse people.
The only way to succeed, as someone else mentioned above, was to delete most of the country’s way of life and start back over, like Japan after WWII. But even that would have been iffy unless we did the same thing to all the surrounding countries that are all the same. The entire society is extremely tribal, and the only way to put it together into something actually coherent involves mass re-teaching of the kids and a LOT of time and effort. The Japanese at least started out smart and industrious. That part of the world is neither.
We got involved in an intra-Arab squabble we had no business getting into.
And of course as with every war, the BS stories flew, like the incubator story in Kuwait.