I don't doubt that the Bush administration sincerely thought there were WMDs in Iraq. After all, Clinton himself -- no friend of the administration -- came to GWB's defense on this, acknowledging that he, Clinton, had made the same assumption.
Now, whether Iraq posed any real threat to the United States notwithstanding its putative possession of WMDs is another question. And I can't see that they did.
That's just simple logic.
You have to ask. Is it possible that they would give those WMD to an enemy of the United States??
Only a fool would answer no to that.
True. Because it
is possible that they would ... and blah blah blah.
But because invasion is so fraught with all sorts of problems of blowback, will kill many innocent people, and has an outcome that no one can predict (a fact embarrassingly obvious, I would think, to anyone in the Bush government by this point) ... the mere
possibility is not enough.
Saddam Hussein had had very little truck with terrorists ... indeed, several that had been given 'refuge' in his country were treated very badly ... he was not part of any Islamist project ... and he was concerned, above all else, with the issue of surviving in office ... not a goal enhanced by kicking sand in the eyes of the United States.
(Even his invasion of Kuwait occurred only after the American ambassador of the day seemed to suggest to him that the United States would not concern itself in such a matter.)
No, the idea of invading Iraq appealed only to hugely arrogant American neocons who thought the world was a set of chess pieces they could move about with some real sense of how the game would turn out.
This was unrealistic, could give only itch to the gods that be, cost the United States much of the respect it once enjoyed in the world, drove away many of America's allies, increased the fissures in American political life, and to date has cost over 3300 American lives.
The war on terror, predictably, has grown more dangerous.
The Islamic world is more unified than ever, and the extreme Islamists are finding recruitment far easier than before the March 2003 invasion.
There were no WMDs in Iraq. But if, for the sake of argument, we assume there were ... the question you've posed is fair: Was it
possible that Hussein would give those WMDs to enemies of the United States?
And the answer, as I've said, is Yes ... but if you think that mere possibility, by any stretch, justifies the Bush regime's war policy ... you are hopelessly over-attached to one of the great specimen's of folly in American political history.