DBWI: No WMD's in Iraq?

As unlikely as it is in hindsight; I nonetheless pose the question to the esteemed posters of AH.com.

What if the claims by skeptics of the Iraq War that there were no Weapon's of Mass Destruction in Iraq turned out to be true after the invasion?; how would such a revelation effect history?
 
The US would have looked pretty foolish if that happened

President Bush may have lost re-election in 2004 and I doubt President Cheney would have won in 2008 over Senator Obama one of the lone voices against the war.

In fact I doubt Obama would have got the nomination- it probably would have been Senator Clinton instead
 
The world would wonder where all the weapons went. Saddam's Iraq was notorious for stockpiling WMD's even before the American invasion, lest we forget Halabja.

Could Saddam have theoretically shipped them to Syria before the invasion? I heard a rumor about that before the weapons were actually found.
 
Could Saddam have theoretically shipped them to Syria before the invasion? I heard a rumor about that before the weapons were actually found.

Or maybe he buried them in the desert. They found that stockpile of nerve gas in Anbar province three years ago. Some people think we'll never find them all.
 
Or maybe he buried them in the desert. They found that stockpile of nerve gas in Anbar province three years ago. Some people think we'll never find them all.

True, through even burying them in the desert probably wouldn't deter the eventual discovery of at least some of it by the US and Iraqi forces later on; it'd have to be removed from Iraq all together more then likely.
 
Saddam's regime was talking out of both sides of it's mouth at the time;

in order to keep the Americans off his back, (which didn't work, but...) he was telling them, and the international inspectors, that he had disposed of all his chemical weapons- almost all of which had been American made to begin with;

but in order to avoid his neighbours trying for Iran-Iraq Round 2, he was telling most of the rest of the middle east that he still had a chemical weapons program.

Trying to preserve deterrence, giving out both stories, and also trying to persuade the rest of the Arab world that he was lying to the Americans- and they had enough technical intelligence to know that.


What happened to Iraq is the actual real world resolution of the liar's paradox; when you tell someone "I am a Liar," we know now they do believe you that one time- and that one time only, and assume everything else you say is raving bullshit.

Now think on; what happens in an army in a state run on that principle? A lot of the missed opportunities to use them, some of the failed calls for chemical support that turn up in the leaked documents, are down to the fact that the Iraqi army had got itself lost in the hall of mirrors and much of it's own command didn't know whether it had chemical weapons or not.

So much had actually been destroyed, so much of what was left had been hidden from the inspectors, then hidden from the hiders, then bureaucratically lost, then scarphed as part of someone's private fiefdom, then mislaid, stolen, stolen back, leaked to third parties who then spread their own disinformation-

The only prudent position the coalition could take, the only way through the confusion, was to demolish the hall of mirrors.

As it happens, they were right- and considering what could have happened to unsupervised chemical warheads floating around the middle east, just as well;


but yes, it would have set a damned ugly precedent if there had been nothing to find. It would have meant America had staged an all out invasion of a sovereign country, an ally less than two decades ago, on a fraudulent premise; an open act of naked aggression. Goodbye, moral high ground, the end of history is over; back in the Imperialist nineteenth century again.
 
Actually, the detractors got egg on their faces when the US Army finally discovered a gigantic underground factory near Mosul making Tabun (GA) nerve gas, since producing Tabun was much easier than making more advanced nerve gases like Sarin (GB), Soman (GD), and VX. And it was discovered that a number of petrochemical plants that was supposed to make common herbicides could easily be converted to make Tabun.

(Indeed, during the Iran-Iraq War, many of the Iranian deaths from poison gas was from Tabun exposure.)

Though the Iraqi military destroyed most of their nerve gas stockpile once the war started, we were still able to find several thousand small rockets and artillery shells filled with Tabun.
 
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