So...were there actually WMDs in Iraq?

[jsc1953]

I keep coming across a meme, popular in conservative commentary: the New York Times reported last year that there were actual WMDs found in Iraq. The mainstream media (apparently, excluding the Times) are trying to bury this fact. So George Bush is vindicated, and is not actually the worst president ever.

Is there any truth to this?

[Ravenman]

There were a not unsubstantial number of old chemical weapons (like mortar shells and such) that were discovered in disused caches. These weapons gave every appearance of simply having been lost or forgotten about for more than a decade. Many of them he deteriorated to the point that they weren’t so much weapons of mass destruction as they were extremely toxic waste.

[garygnu]

IIRC, there were some pre-Kuwait chemical weapons in rusted-out, unusable shells. I believe they had been accounted for by inspectors.

[XT]

This is probably the NY Times article referred to in the OP:

It was August 2008 near Taji, Iraq. They had just exploded a stack of old Iraqi artillery shells buried beside a murky lake. The blast, part of an effort to destroy munitions that could be used in makeshift bombs, uncovered more shells.

Two technicians assigned to dispose of munitions stepped into the hole. Lake water seeped in. One of them, Specialist Andrew T. Goldman, noticed a pungent odor, something, he said, he had never smelled before.

He lifted a shell. Oily paste oozed from a crack. “That doesn’t look like pond water,” said his team leader, Staff Sgt. Eric J. Duling.

The specialist swabbed the shell with chemical detection paper. It turned red — indicating sulfur mustard, the chemical warfare agent designed to burn a victim’s airway, skin and eyes.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West.

The New York Times found 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to nerve or mustard agents after 2003. American officials said that the actual tally of exposed troops was slightly higher, but that the government’s official count was classified.

So, yes…they found some. Some of it was even usable (supposedly the CIA purchased ‘400 Borak rockets filled with pure Sarin gas’, though the details are sketchy. It would be surprising if we had found nothing at all, considering the extent that the Iraqi’s had built up their chemical weapons program and stockpiles. I don’t think that this vindicates Bush or justifies the invasion, however.

[Ravenman]

My last post didn’t catch an edit for some reason.

There is still no evidence of any active WMD program at the time of the invasion. Post war reports tend to indicate that Saddam shut down those programs, but didn’t want to be fully transparent about that in order to create uncertainty in the mind of Iran, Saddam’s top security concern. The reports also tend to indicate that he would strongly consider restarting WMD programs if sanctions were ever lifted.

[Ruken]

We had a thread on this when the article came out. A buddy of mine was in Iraq with the UN before we invaded. Occasionally the Iraqis would find these old shells and he’d have to deal with them.
Everyone knew about these. So yes, they were there.

[AK84]

Washington Post analysis of the claims.

[XT]

@Ravenman

My last post didn’t catch an edit for some reason.

There is still no evidence of any active WMD program at the time of the invasion. Post war reports tend to indicate that Saddam shut down those programs, but didn’t want to be fully transparent about that in order to create uncertainty in the mind of Iran, Saddam’s top security concern. The reports also tend to indicate that he would strongly consider restarting WMD programs if sanctions were ever lifted.

Right…I meant to touch on this as well. The key point is the weapons PROGRAMS had been halted. That was probably the most disingenuous aspect of the Bush run up to war, that those programs had just gone underground, were using mobile manufacturing truck thingies or were under children’s hospitals and the like. Afaik, there was no evidence found then or to this day that any of this was the case.

So, while I think it’s true that liberals tend to overstate the ‘there were no WMD in Iraq!’ claim, the spirit of the statement is and was true…the weapons PROGRAMS had in fact been halted. And if Saddam had been more transparent about this during the Clinton administrations time I think this entire sorry mess could have been avoided, at least from the US’s perspective. I think that, given the Arab Spring movement that Iraq would have boiled over in a similar fashion to what happened in Iran with their Green movement and what happened in Syria, but it wouldn’t have been OUR fault at least.

[septimus]

@Ravenman

Post war reports tend to indicate that Saddam shut down those programs,…

I won’t look for a cite, but wasn’t it the case that Saddam thought he still had programs producing nerve gas or other chemical weapons? The managers of those programs were unable to proceed due to sanction-caused scarcities, but they were afraid to “tell the Emperor he was wearing no clothes.”

ETA: Pro-tip for OP.

@jsc1953

I keep coming across a meme, popular in conservative commentary: … The mainstream media (apparently, excluding the Times) are trying to bury this fact.

When information between “conservative” and mainstream media conflict, there’s seldom any real purpose for additional research.

[AK84]

@septimus

I won’t look for a cite, but wasn’t it the case that Saddam thought he still had programs producing nerve gas or other chemical weapons? The managers of those programs were unable to proceed due to sanction-caused scarcities, but they were afraid to “tell the Emperor he was wearing no clothes.”

Untrue, as documents post war revealed he told his Aides.

Saddam’s goal in the 1990s was to have the Security Council lift the economic sanctions strangling the Iraqi economy, by convincing council members Iraq had eliminated its WMD. But he was thwarted at every turn by what he and aides viewed as U.S. hard-liners blocking council action.

The inspectors “destroyed everything and said, `Iraq completed 95 percent of their commitment,”’ Saddam said at one meeting. "We cooperated with the resolutions 100 percent and you all know that, and the 5 percent they claim we have not executed could take them 10 years to (verify).

"Don’t think for a minute that we still have WMD," he told his deputies. "We have nothing

[Vaevictis]

The NYT report notes that a lot of these finds were covered up at the time because they were from the chemical warfare programs undertaken with Western aid during the Iran-Iraq war. So they were lost leftovers from just the wrong program and that is why the Bush administration preferred they be swept under the carpet. As a result, soldiers who were injured disposing of these things could not be acknowledged as having been wounded by chemical weaponry and suffered greatly as a result.

Basically, when you have made a big deal about Hussein having WMDs and all you find are traces of the WMD you helped him get, you don’t have much to trumpet about.

[Great_Antibob]

The other part of the war justification was the idea not just that any such weapons and associated development program existed but that they represented an imminent and/or existential threat to the US and other nations.

Even granting a large amount of latitude that something like unknown and dangerous weapons existed, they were often more of a threat to locals unlucky enough to get accidentally exposed to the decaying bits than anybody else.