Weapons of mass destruction

The reason for the Iraq war — settled on, as Paul Wolfowitz later explained, for ‘bureaucratic reasons’. Conflated Scud missiles and alleged ‘stockpiles’ of chemical or biological payloads with weapons Saddam certainly didn’t have, but we did: eg, nukes. The term ‘weapons of mass destruction’ actually originated in 1937, to describe what we would now call ‘conventional weapons’.

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