The Independent Journalism Review notices that the New York Times had to sort of correct itself from a decade ago:

It wasn’t the only justification for the Iraq War, but it certainly has often been held up as the biggest. Although it has been claimed before that chemical weapons had been found in Post-Hussein Iraq, due to new documents uncovered by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the New York Times is now reporting it in a piece, “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons.”

While various news sources had reported the finding before, all assertions that Hussein had chemical weapons in some capacity (weapons-grade or not – they had been hidden from U.N. inspectors) were largely scoffed at as nothing more than supercilious bunk. Well, behold…

The news report from the Times explains the now not-secret revelation that there had been WMDs in Iraq, after all:

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The NY Times even published a map of all the cases when American military troops were exposed to the formerly ‘non-existent’ weapons of mass destruction:

As The Blaze’s Oliver Darcy pointed out, the WMD discoveries were kept partly hidden from Congress.

Retired Army major Jarrod Lampier, who was there when the U.S. military found 2,400 nerve agent rockets in 2006 — the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war – said of the finding’s import, “‘Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say.”

Similar to what the Pentagon is now saying about climate change, because the Obama administration ordered the military to exaggerate something that has absolutely nothing to do with national defense.

Back to Iraq: The other cliché you heard from liberals for nearly a quarter-century is “No Blood for Oil!” Oil is a form of energy. Energy is only the thing that runs everything in an economy, including the military. At no point, during Operation Desert Storm or Operation Enduring Freedom, did I have a problem with the rationale of protecting oil from Saddam Hussein. If OPEC was crushed, I would be one of the happiest people on the planet.