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I think 9-11 changed a lot and Saddam didn’t get the memo.

Post 9-11 we were FAFO.

Saddam should have let the UN WMD inspectors do their job. He should have followed the 91 armistice no fly and no wheel zone agreement. He should have backed off from trying to build long range missiles which exceeded the 150 km armistice range limits and which he used in the 2003 war.

He was screwing with us when he really should have behaved.

The WMD issue was the main argument for the public, but I tend to believe it was Saddam’s constant playing of games where he’s shooting at our jets enforcing the no fly zones, his constant violating of the no wheel zones etc. that painted a bullseye on his head.

Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_bombing_of_Iraq

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-10-mn-21331-story.html

Was the WMD argument BS, yes (about 98% certain). I do not think it was an intentional lie. Lying about that and knowing we are going to war most likely is setting yourself up for public humiliation as indeed was the case for Powell and others.

I think the IC simply did what people tend to do, look for those facts and give credence to those facts which validate what we want to believe. We took sources which our allies (Germany) handed over to us with the caveat that they think he’s a flake, and we gave them a huge degree of importance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

Saddam knew if we find WMD it legitimizes our action and he’s toast. Even nations opposing the war would have joined in.

His dream, his plan, was to wage a massive guerilla war against us and after outlasting and bleeding us, we leave and he returns to power. Why he created the Saddam Faydayeen. If we find WMD, 100% for sure Saddam would not return to power again.

Saddam knew he can’t fight us conventionally and in open terrain, so his strategy was to fight us in urban battles for the big fight, and then wear us down with a guerilla type war following. That’s what the Saddam Faydayeen was really meant for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedayeen_Saddam. They had cached weapons and ammo, trained in unconventional warfare, and we’re structured so that you don’t know who is a member as in a normal military.

The idea was after the big war ends and his military is defeated, but hopefully inflicts some damage on us, the guerilla war starts. (1) You had the regime loyalists like the Faydayeen and others. (2) To add to that, Saddam opened all the prisons and let literally every criminal out. Why? That would become our mess to deal with. Puts us under more stress and frankly it did. (3) Once the “infidel” sets foot in Iraq, you got an influx of foreign jihadist types from almost everywhere. We had Chechens, Sudanese, you name it come into Iraq to fight us. (4) Then you had the militias, people like Muqtadr al Sadr used the chance to carve a part of Iraq out for themselves. You had numerous militias pop up and many of them stood in opposition to us, some of the Shia ones were getting support from Iran (NVGs, mortar rounds, GPS, Intel and advisors, IED components to make them more effective, sniper rifles...).

But we were our own worst enemy! Why?

On the political front, Paul Bremmer wanted De-Bathification, so he made the horrible decision to disband the Iraqi military and Intel service. With the stroke of the pen, he took what could have been our biggest asset, a buffer between us and the threat, which knows the threat better than us (dealt with it for decades), and made them into on watchers or worse yet, part of the problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Provisional_Authority_Order_2 (This decision guaranteed, cost many American lives)

Knowing the mess we created, we decided to pay many people (former Iraqi military and Intel) a “stipend” in Iraq. This was to keep them from becoming a problem. But, instead of them working for us, we were paying for them to stay home and laugh as they watch TV and see us get blown up. Our political leadership in Iraq and DC was idiological (democracy, no Ba’ath influence), not pragmatic.

Saddam possibly got rid of his WMD shortly before the war, that’s one theory. Syria and Iraq are both Ba’ath regimes at the time, many of Saddam’s family fled to Syria, the insurgency against us used Syria as their base of operations in part. This theory states that the WMD used by Syria in 2012-2014 are originally from Iraq. Plausible theory.

In either case, when we invaded, Iraq didn’t use them against us, and we didn’t find any appreciable amount of chemical weapons.

Iraq had no WMD, and was not meddling with terrorism (at least not in the way which should make them our target). No AQ based terrorists since these posed a threat to the more secular Ba’ath regime as well.

If anything, even though not out of kindness, Saddam was more or less an ally in fighting this form of Islamic based terrorism out of mutual interest. Sort of ironic that we removed him from power given the fact that he’s a sworn enemy of Iran and more or less has mutual interests regards Islamic based terrorism.

That doesn’t mean Iraq wasn’t meddling with terrorism, many nations do, even we do. We just call them “freedom fighters” when they’re our terrorists. Iraq was paying the families of suicide bombers in Israel and attempted to take the life of George H. Bush in Kuwait (they got caught red handed trying to do this): https://www.hnn.us/article/how-do-we-know-that-iraq-tried-to-assassinate-pres

Usually people already know what side of an issue they want to choose and merely look for the facts to validate that position. Most people do NOT formulate their position based on where the overwhelming evidence suggests the truth rests. That is true with Iraq 2003 or Ukraine today... Iraq provoked us a lot, for many years, in many ways. But did they have WMD and were they meddling with AQ type terrorists? No.

Whether the war in Iraq was justified depends on what variables you want to include, where you want to draw the line.

What is for sure, is that we paid a high price: 4,500 US KIA and 32,000 US WIA, uniformed casualties: https://www.war.gov/casualty.pdf

Of course our allies also paid a price, the UK, Kurds, Poles, Australia and of course firms like Black Water and Triple Canopy also took losses. The largest casualties of anyone were absorbed by the Iraqis themselves.