[rintintin]

Not going to rehash the war but the facts are we did find and destroy thousands of chemical weapons.”

Those are not the facts and what you say is untrue. Bush and Cheney even admit we found no WMDs

[FalloutShelterGirl]

Then how did they use chemical weapons against the Kurds? Chemical weapons are an WMD classification.

[SFConservative]

US troops in fact found many cleared-out chemical and biological laboratory and manufacturing facilities in Iraq, as well as one large nuclear lab. These places had significant amounts of residual chemical weapons materials and precursors, though no complete WMDs.

If you recall, Chemical Ali was Saddam Hussein's head of all the chemical weapon activities and in charge of using them against the Kurds as well as Shia resistance groups. He was hanged in 2010 for chemical weapon genocide of the Kurds. Iraq was clearly using WMDs against its own people.

Shortly before the 2003 invasion, the UN and others reported large convoys of trucks totaling 1,200 semis taking "stuff" from Iraq into Syria. These reports have been largely purged as it is no longer PC to say that Iraq had WMDs since it is much more important to accuse the USA of starting a baseless war; baseless as in Iraq systematically violating something like 17 UN resolutions. But it certainly gave al Assad a nice headstart with going after his own opposition groups with chemical weapons. I suspect that what we are not supposed to know is which other countries helped Saddam with developing all this stuff.

[lepton]

Bush and Cheney even admit we found no WMDs

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You might want to look at the context for those statements.

The idea that there were no WMDs in Iraq is simply absurd. In addition to clear use in their war with Iran, after Desert Storm, some large amounts of them were declared by Iraq, sampled, tagged, and many turned over for destruction - all with the involvement of a multitude of nations - and some of those sampled and tagged materials not turned over for destruction.

You’ve been throwing this silliness - and largely non sequitur - around for years, then fall on your face when presented with any of the wide variety of proofs that your position is unsustainable, at which time you start shifting goal posts or just move on to repeat elsewhere.

The issue at the time was not whether Iraq had them, but rather what happened to them, with our intelligence agencies stating a belief that Iraq did not in fact secretly destroy the materials declared, sampled, and tagged which had not been turned over for destruction.

There is also the legitimate argument over whether the response was appropriate, and even if appropriate was it performed correctly. That there were no WMDs there is not one of the legitimate arguments.