Furthermore, to this day all of the media, so far as I’m aware, continues to unwittingly contribute to the obfuscation over the justification for the invasion by its persistent use of the acronym “WMD”, which has the effect of lumping chemical, biological and nuclear weapons together for purposes of reporting and analysis. In all the years leading up to the invasion, it was widely believed, or at least strongly suspected, that Saddam Hussein retained chemical weapons, which he had used previously. It was considered much, much less likely that he had developed nuclear weapons after the Osirak attack by Israel. But, it was the threat of nuclear weapons above all that was used to sell the American public on the invasion. As Condoleezza Rice so infamously defended the lack of definitive evidence of WMDs, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” It seems highly unlikely that the threat of chemical weapons alone would have been enough to get public support for an invasion, given the limitations of any threat posed by such weapons and the fact that Hussein would have presumably had such weapons for many years, and not used them against the U.S. So, in the eyes of the Bush administration, the threat had to be hyped to the level of a nuclear danger, and so it was, despite the exceedingly limited and dubious evidence for a nuclear threat. That is why all the nonsense about aluminum tubes and yellow cake was so important to the Bush administration. Language matters. By so frequently lumping together the three types of “WMD” in its reporting, the media has carelessly helped obscure the fact that the invasion was politically sold in a bait and switch maneuver befitting a snake oil salesman, conflating one seemingly likely but limited threat with another quite unlikely but theoretically much more dangerous threat. We would be better off if the media would just quit using the term “WMD”.