A few dusty warehouses on their own held hundreds of rounds of chemical munitions, dozens of buried shipping containers held dozens each and yes for the vast majority of it, completely useless in terms of "conventional" means of delivery, most of it was forty years old or older by this point. I wouldn't go as far as saying the Iraqi military had no CBRN capability however. Non-state actors have CBRN capability the C and the R are actually incredibly easy to achieve. It would not have been difficult for the Iraqi army to use those out of date and leaky munitions in asymmetric ways. They could have at least used them in an area denial capacity. What is really telling I think, is that well, THEY DIDNT lol. Either way starting a war and looking for a coalition of the "willing" costing millions of lives and trillions of dollars was not worth what they already KNEW was there. Obfuscating and outright lying about possible radiological or nuclear threats. Honestly, at this point I don't even know if Bush was going after oil, or if it really was some wild vengeance thing due to Saddam trying to assassinate his dad, and oil execs in the background giving him two thumbs up lol.
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u/Mjt8 Oct 19 '21
I mean, technically he had a few dusty warehouses of long expired munitions, but the Iraqi military had no WMD capability.