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Originally Posted by ratbastid
Also, don't forget the bang-up job the administration did linking Iraq and 9/11 in the public mind, despite there being no evidence to support that.
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you made that up. Bush never linked 9/11 and Iraq though he has repeatedly (and justifiably) made the case that Iraq harbored terrorists and possessed the means to arm them with WMD.
Our troops have found over 500 different shells/canisters filled with weaponized chemicals. most predate the first gulf war... so that doesn't necessarily confirm an active WMD program during the runup to Operation Iraqi Freedom. However, it does underscore the threat a Saddam-led Iraq posed.
If we can recover 500 shells after Saddam's removal we can reliably assume that either:
1) his control over his arsenal was never complete
or
2) he had weaponized chemical compounds available to slide to jihadi groups under that table.
In either case, the potential for al-qaeda (or similar groups) to access chemical weapons via Iraqi channels was a definite threat. With
Ayman Al-Zawahiri making trips into Iraq during the 90's and the preponderance of other evidence linking Ba'athist sympathies to jihadist goals... the pre-OIF situation was unsuitable for anything but a purely defensive stance in the GWOT.