Nobody — not even Bush’s harshest critics — ever made the case that Iraq NEVER produced chemical weapons. In fact, one of the issues that led up to the war was that Iraq’s accounting of old chemical warhead stockpiles and supplies was incomplete (but there were published inventories). The chemical attack on the Kurds was well known. Clearly, Iraq had chemical weapons. That’s not the issue. The issue was whether they were still actively producing chemical weapons at the time we went to war. I haven’t read the entire article yet but I don’t see anything in this article that supports Bush’s position that Iraq was actively producing chemical weapons prior to the invasion.
Iraq was forbidden from having the weapons. Period.
Looks like Iraq had the weapons.
So what’s the problem?
That was not Bush’s position. He repeatedly asserted that we needed to prevent Saddam from reconstituting its programs. The one thing that was ongoing right up to the end was Iraq’s long range missile development program as it had just constructed a test stand for the rocket motors.
“The issue was whether they were still actively producing chemical weapons ...”
That’s called ‘moving the goalpost’ on an issue.
That was not the Bush administration’s position. There were 30 some basis given for going to war, of which WMDs were only directly involved in a few. The Administration stated that they were not an imminent threat (the “not” was edited out of many editorials for more than a year), but that in concert with other things that were going on that we couldn’t afford to wait until they were a direct threat.
As for making the case that there were never chemical weapons...you’re half right. It wasn’t flatly stated that there were never chemical weapons, but it was implied that Bush made it all up...so strongly that there are probably a hundred million Americans that believe Iraq never had them.
oh, and Bush’s description was that they had “programs” and could “reconstitute”. We found all kinds of programs and support facilities for production and deployment.