Why did most western countries believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass destruction?

Question

Why did most western countries believe that Iraq had Weapons of Mass destruction?

Answer 1

They just went for the oil.

Answer 2

Because they did.

We recovered nerve gas, nerve gas artillery shells and two mobile WMD laboratories.

Also they were making nuclear materials.

We tried and convicted the Dutch guy who was transporting the nerve agent into Iraq, and today he sits in prison.

What more could we have found? And yet still some want to deny it all.

Try convincing the guy in prison, that he never hauled 100 tonnes of nerve agent into Iraq.

Answer 3

TheFrench did not. That was one of the three reasons they would not send troops. Little known fact; there are French military in Afghanistan.

Answer 4

because most western countries sold them to them

Answer 5

I credit this to two things:

1. Groupthink.  Each feed off the other.  

2.  Saddam was purposely playing a dangerous game.  They wanted to make Iran think they still had some, while telling us they didn't.  They did things like keeping inspectors out of sites, or moving equipment before inspectors came, to keep everyone guessing.  In the end, it bit them in the ***.

Answer 6

because they did and sadam used them to commit genocide against he kurds. weapons of mass destruction arent just nukes, they can be chemical or biological weapons too. and in this case it was chemical

EDIT: i did not take donald's answer i didnt even see it until after i posted my answer

Answer 7

Because they did.

Weapons of Mass destruction are not just nuclear bombs. This includes biological and chemical weapons, too.

Saddam had chemical weapons, and he did something even Hitler wouldn't do. He used them. He was trying to exterminate to Kurds with them in 1988. His shell game with the U.N. Inspection teams, when they came looking for evidence of further violations of the agreement s that ended the first gulf war, were blocked, as trucks were moved out of the places in question. This made it obvious he was hiding something.

Two of these trucks were found, abandoned and empty, just over the border in the Syrian Desert. These trucks had been emptied, but the cargo area where the labs were, were sealed with a substance ONLY USED IN THE MANUFACTURE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS.

The rest of the stuff was obviously buried somewhere in the desert.

Now, about his desire to acquire nukes. Do you know what a centrifuge of the type he was buying is only used for?

Do you know what yellow cake is? This stuff was found, recently, in large quantities, and quietly shipped to Canada for reprocessing into nuclear fuel.

Biological? I don't know anything about that. Maybe someone else can answer that.

So, for your answer, turn off CNN and MSNBC. You can find firsthand knowledge of these things directly from the soldiers that found them, here on the internet. Those two TV stations have very much shamed themselves in their biased and evidently blind reporting. These irresponsible reports were made to embarrass and attack President Bush.

As Mulder says, "The truth is out there."

Answer 8

The U.S. secretly removed 500 tons of yellow cake from Iraq and sent it to Canada.  It takes 10 tons of yellow cake to make one atomic bomb.  If the U.S. were to yell that they found WMD material, every possible terrorist would have went into Iraq for that yellow cake and Iran would have taken more serious steps to steal some for their own use.

Saddam had some of the processing equipment already put in when the invasion took place.  The U.S. also found 500 chemical shells that were suppose to have been destroyed.

Answer 9

The U.S. propaganda media machine did it's job well!

Answer 10

Because, according to Saddam himself, he wanted Iran to believe he did so he put out false information.  The point wasn't did he or didn't he, the point was he once did, he used them, and he threw out the inspectors so we could no longer know.

When the UN went in originally under Bush senior, they determined he was less than a year away from having nuclear weapons.  The inspectors had been out for years under Clinton before we went in.  It was bad intelligence, but it was a wise decision.