This is completely separate from the exact state of Saddam's WMD programs when we invaded Iraq in March 2003. The press hasn't been interested in stories that demonstrate what Saddam hid away (tip to Instapundit):
The 2003 Iraq invasion by U.S. forces also launched a massive effort to find WMDs. By late 2003, as determined in a review by a Wired Magazine editor of WikiLeaks documents on the issue, the Administration was losing faith WMDs would be found. But, as Wired reports, the WikiLeaks documents clearly show "for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction. . . . Chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam's toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents."
I noted these incidents as they cropped up during the insurgencies. The point was not that we found post-1991 chemical weapons, since what we found were Iran-Iraq War vintage--but that it was possible for chemical weapons to remain hidden even years after the fall of Saddam's regime.
I still think that it is highly unlikely that all the world's major intelligence agencies were wrong on this topic. Saddam was bluffing Iran to keep them at bay while his conventional military was weak from Desert Storm and post-war sanctions, but he'd logically need some on hand to play out that bluff in an emergency until he could break out and fabricate new chemical weapons (and he maintained the infrastructure to build chemical weapons in place). Saddam either sent them abroad before, during, or after our invasion (with or without Russian or French help) or buried them in Iraq.
We'll find out what happened to them. Saddam buried a lot out there.
And this issue is apart from the basic fact that WMD were just one of the many reasons Congress declared war on Iraq, and not the only reason. But that would be getting dangerously close to the truth, too.
