This is rather tricky. You will need to look into Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. I believe that Bush did, genuinely, believe there were WMDs, both due to suspicious activities on behalf of Saddam and due to intelligence reports. What you need here is to stop the people who are faking them. Or perhaps have some way for the media to pick up on some of the problems. There was a bit of a mob mentality with the media about WMDs. Big, flashy, great for getting viewers. And Bush... his mentality would likely be different without 9-11. He may well have just went the Clinton route and bomb Iraq without war.
I doubt that the U.S. would have invaded Iraq in this TL; indeed, I simply don't think that the U.S. Congress would have felt the same sense of urgency in regards to Iraq as it felt after 9/11 in our TL.As the tin says, assuming 9/11 doesn't happen as in OTL, when would GWB invade Iraq? What would US politics look like for the War in Iraq without 9/11 happening beforehand? What if a 9/11 style event happens after the invasion of Iraq, does GWB get the blame unlike in OTL?
tbph, it was a reasonable guess that Saddam had WMDs because he'd used them before: the chemical weapons that he used against the Kurds. not nukes like probably alot of people thought, but poison gas and the like.This is rather tricky. You will need to look into Cheney, Rumsfeld, and others. I believe that Bush did, genuinely, believe there were WMDs, both due to suspicious activities on behalf of Saddam and due to intelligence reports. What you need here is to stop the people who are faking them. Or perhaps have some way for the media to pick up on some of the problems. There was a bit of a mob mentality with the media about WMDs. Big, flashy, great for getting viewers. And Bush... his mentality would likely be different without 9-11. He may well have just went the Clinton route and bomb Iraq without war.
tbph, it was a reasonable guess that Saddam had WMDs because he'd used them before: the chemical weapons that he used against the Kurds. not nukes like probably alot of people thought, but poison gas and the like.
it could be argued that chemical weapons are actually worse than nukes in some ways: if you get hit by a nuke then that's the end of it, you're dead and your suffering has ended. if you get hit by a poison gas attack, though, you'll be writhing in agony for several minutes at least, and if you somehow get out of it then you'll be suffering for alot longer than the instantaneous death of being in an atomic fireball. of course, a similar argument could be made regarding nukes thanks to radiation poisoning and the like.A teacher I had in the 1990s really hated the term WMDs, because it blurred the lines between massively destructive weapons like nukes, much less destructive but very cruel weapons like chemicals and unproven, unexperienced, difficult to weaponize weapons like bio.
Now it's understandable though why that catchall term was employed. In the 1991 Persian Gulf War the U.S. was not fearing Iraqi nukes but wanted to deter Iraqi chemical weapons use, and so we kind of kicked chemicals up to the same level so that we could implicitly threaten, you go chemical, we go nuclear.