WMDs in Iraq and Syria

Or some underpaid and enterprising manager of a conventional weapons depot in Iraq sold Assad resupplies, or ISIS captured depots ended up on the black market and bought by Assad's middlemen. And then what happened in Syria was not only a tragic accident but those missing Iraqi WMDs.

The question "Did Iraq have chemical weapons?" is a stupid question because it is not quantified. The inspectors gave a small upper bound on the number of weapons and they were right.

Yes, the CIA reached its conclusions from its communications interceptions. But just because they had reasons for those conclusions doesn't mean that they were good reasons. It should instead have trusted the inspectors, who actually knew something about weapons, unlike the CIA. Chemistry trumps spies.

There is a lot of equivocation between weapons and factories. People summarize the question as "Did Iraq have WMD?" but what Powell said to the UN was that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons factories. This was completely wrong. If the CIA can't remember what it said, it can't learn from its mistakes. But if its job is to fabricate causus belli, heck of job.

My father had a hypothesis about WMDs in Iraq: Saddam's underlings were corrupt and "exaggerated" the amount of chemical weapons they had produced. After all, anyone who admitted that he couldn't make the quantity he promised was going to be in big trouble. Also, if you say you made 100 units of chemical weapons but only made 50, you get paid for making 100 but only had to spend enough money to make 50, and you get to steal the difference. Again, nobody is going to admit to stealing from Saddam, so when it came time to destroy the 100 units that existed on paper, the inspectors would only find the 50 that actually existed, and there would be 50 more units "missing" that nobody could admit didn't exist in the first place.

The US intercepted communications where Saddam told his units to ensure that they had no chemical weapons that inspectors could find. Of course, that communication didn't happen in English. That communication seems to have been misinterpreted by the US intelligence community as evidence that Saddam is hiding WMDs.

Even in the English given, I can see alternate interpretations. Make sure you destroy any you have. Make sure they can't find any you have.

Anyone knows how intelligence works? Given those two interpretations, do they get assigned priors that trickle up?

My impression from the Saddam days is that the scenario that Saddam destroyed his weapons the best he could, while trying to maintain the appearance that he had them, really hadn't trickled up to general consciousness, if anyone had considered it at all.

People are overly confident in thinking they've covered the possible motivations a person might have had. "He wouldn't have done this unless."

Any actual science out there on this particular effect?

Saddam had WMD's, after all. Kim has it, too. I wouldn't be at all surprised, if it is quite common. A little secret of a lot of countries, worldwide. We shall see what some neural network, or some other system will have to say about this matter.