If it was not propaganda, then the US believed what they wanted to believe, at the cost of many human lives. Other countries expressed some doubts and they werenāt listened to.
It seems that even Collin Powell himself was tricked to the present the āproofā for WMD before the UN security councel (in particular biological weapons in the form of Anthrax).
Europe was divided on the matter prior to the invasion. Many didnāt really buy the WMD story and didnāt want to get involved, but a number of European governments still supported the invasion of Iraq and some even supplied combat forces. Maybe not because they were convinced by the WMD story, but more because they chose to stand by the US for other reasons (for example historical).
[Governmental positions on the Iraq War prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq - Wikipedia]
Ah yes, that olā tired excuse againā¦
I mean, why put effort when nobody cares for anything more than appearances.
I may be too trusting of Wikipedia, but its summary of what I take to be the NYT times article you reference (although it dates to October, not March 2014) can be read here:Iraq and weapons of mass destruction - Wikipedia and seems to me to give a reasonable summary of the contents of the article. Nothing in the article, which largely concerns decaying munition created before the Gulf War, supports the claims made to promote the invasion of Iraq.
I think itās this article:
It is not that people didnāt believe it.
It is that having such weapons was not a reason to invade any country, considering that most of the countries that complained about it were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, which is the epitomy of āmass destructionā.
Was there ever proof of them using them in any extent? That is what most people doubted.
For example @Conrad_Melville mentioned that it practically took them a decade to find them and bury them out, so they were probably not āactive dutyā weapons.
How many of them where even functional? That is always the question in military equipment.
The 2014 article is talking chiefly about decaying weapons from before the Gulf War.
It should be remembered that the ālegalā predication for the invasion (assuming that legality has any real meaning in world politics) was that Saddam was persistently violating 17 points in the treaty he had signed. There were also substantial human rights violations, although the significance of that, then as now, is debatable.
Soft evidence of the gas stockpiles also existed. I didnāt mention it in my previous post because I wanted to stick to the hard evidence. But the overall picture is always important. The chief of the Iraqi air force said that some of the gas stockpile was flown to Syria in the final days. Syria, of course, used gas before and after the Second Gulf War. Significantly, it was thought that Syria had no more gas after the earlier use of it under Hafez al-Assad. In addition, satellite reconnaissance revealed a convoy of about 150 dump trucks that left an ammunition depot in Baghdad (thought to contain a gas stockpile) and traveled to Syria; the problem is no one knows what was in those trucks. This was all publicly reported.
I have always been puzzled as to why Saddam did not flee Iraq. But I donāt know enough about Middle East politics to know what kind of reception he would have gotten in Syria or elsewhere. Perhaps his plans went awry.
My phrasing was unfortunately ambiguous. The 2014 article was when the information was publicized. I strongly suspect that the searches ended before the Bush administration left office in January 2009. The new administration would have had no reason to continue the searches.
Whatever, in 2003
- most US claims concerning Irak were dubious, or very exaggerated, or even plain wrong.
- Irak wasnāt a serious threat against the US or its allies
- The majority of the US population supported the invasion of Irak. Or at most didnāt want to waste taxpayerās money or were concerned about lives of american soldiers, but didnāt care much about lives of Iraki civilians.
Now letās make a parallel with the present situation. Replace ā2003ā with ā2022ā, āUSā with āRussiaā and āIrakā with āUkraineā above.
I think you misapprehend me. Neither of my posts on this were intended to draw or deny a parallel with Ukraine, which I did not mention. I have no interest in discussing a parallel, one way or the other.
hehhe
Also, dwarf fortress has such a nice music
I didnāt say you were comparing with Ukraine, I was the one who made the parallel before you posted on the subject. My point was that people who criticize Russians that donāt protest against the invasion (*) might not protest if their country was the invader.
(*) Again Iām not talking about you or about a specific person here, my statement is a generality.
Yeah, letās have some fun a little and watch something funny.
Wait, no. Letās watch cats then.
Arguably funny:
Marx was GERMAN. 
I guess US is ready for another ācommunism is the devilā run.
Even if he was Russian anywayā¦
But eh, the US are weird like that sometimes.
I will just say the automatic hagiography when someone dies annoys me.