Name:   Talullahhound - Subject:   Set aside definitions for a moment Date:   10/15/2014 5:02:49 PM

Okay. lets set aside definitions for a moment. We'll agree that both nuclear material and chemical weapons are both bad things.   The thing is this - we knew he had the chemical weapons because he used them on his own people and he used them against the Iranians.  But, the thing that Bush Administration used to justify the war was that he was working on a nuclear program - remember the "intel" that said that he was seeking yellow cake to enrich uranium?  Remember concern that he would make bombs, either strategic or tactical and provide them to terrorists.  We knew he had he capability to manufacture chemical weapons, but we never did see that he was still manufacturing them and he certainly wasn't anywhere close to having a nuclear capability. 

All of the chemical weapons that were found, according to the article, were manufactured prior to 1991 and either in remote sites or buried.  So I will continue to stand on my original comment that we didn't find WMD,i.e. nuclear material. 

But the real tragedy is that members of our military were harmed by these things, while the Army refused to acknolweldge it.  Now why would the Army (and the administration) classify the discovery of these chemical weapons if they proved their reason for going into Iraq?  Seems to me that this would have been headlines.  And all the subsequent reports that were done on Iraq stated that they didn't find WMD. 

And not that it matters, I have never heard the military refer to chem/bio weapons as "weapons of mass destruction".