I'm going to violate one of my own self-imposed rules for posting, and just not read the whole thread. So, I don't know whether anyone has mentioned this. If so, please ignore.
According to the NY Times article, the reason for the cover-up is that they claim that these chemical weapons were developed and produced with critical assistance from the west, and from the US government, and they didn't want to reveal their existence because it would put the US and the west in a bad light. As well, the NY Times claims that this does NOT vindicate the assertion by the Bush administration that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because, well... Bush had asserted that Hussein had ACTIVE PROGRAMS of weapons of mass destruction, and these weapons had clearly been mothballed.
I personally don't remember that distinction. I remember us telling Hussein that he had to surrender ALL weapons of mass destruction, and that Bush's assertion was that he hadn't done that.
But I'm old. Maybe I misremember?
sitetest
My memory agrees with your memory.
Additonally, they found recipes for making wmds, so I assume Saddam knew how to make them.
You don’t misremember- the Bush admin explanation for going to war was that sanctions were failing, and if the “axis of evil” succeeded in getting sanctions lifted then Iraq, which had dispersed their weapons programs and even outsourced them to aligned countries, would be free of inspections and also be free to reconstitute [Bush specifically said reconstitute] their programs and purchase anything it required to succeed. Iraq had not yet opened up freely and provided a verifiable full report of their weapons program or supplied evidence they destroyed what they claimed they destroyed. In some pits there was not enough material to account for the amount of weapons they claimed to have disposed of, in many cases they claimed to have destroyed materials but did not do so under UN observation as required.
And if sanctions were lifted what would become of the prisoners Iraq had captured in its previous two wars- mainly entire families of Kuwaitis whose hereditary landholdings Iraq wanted to negate? We would never know, and would not be returned. There was still some hope they were alive. But I don’t recall if any did. The Bush Sr. admin if the cease fire had been formalized yet and certainly the incoming Clinton admin should have bombed the snot out of Baghdad when they weren’t immediately returned but instead let the matter sit for years trying to generate coups against Hussein instead of direct action, and failing, getting our assets killed instead, leaving us more and more blind to what was going on there just as Iraq was getting more and more aid from France and Russia, etc..