We know for a fact that there were old chemical weapons munitions. The US military disposed of thousands of them. They were all pre Gulf War. What wasn't found were active chemical weapons labs.

"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."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleea...

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"According to the 10,000-word, eight-part interactive report ("The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons" [by the NY Times]) by C.J. Chivers published on the paper's website late Tuesday, at least 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers were exposed to nerve or mustard agents in Iraq after 2003."

"'Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say,” Jarrod Lampier, a retired Army major, said of the 2006 discovery of 2,400 nerve-agent rockets at a former Republican Guard compound, the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war."

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chemical-weapons-found-in-iraq-ny...

In short, it was propaganda that got us into that war, but it was also propaganda that got us out. The current common mythology around the Iraq war isn't any more accurate than the mythology that got us into it.

Because it's safer to have a chemical weapons early-warning system that goes off too often rather than too little?

The cost of a false negative when lives are at stake are worth noisy alarms (smoke detectors).

When exceptional signals become normalized from too many false positives, people start ignoring alarms.

I wonder if there are exceptions to this rule in war zones where one's life is at stake.

Anecdote: Yes, errant gun fire and far off explosions stopped making the hair on the back of our neck stand up during deployment, but we always waited for the controlled detonation signal or confirmation if the area where small arms fire was happening. It's possible that my perspective didn't match the general sentiment of the unit. It still seemed like there wasn't much complacency.

And one of the times where the explosions weren't controlled detonations, the reaction force was mounted and moving to location in the standard allotted time.

In Israel when we hear the color red alarm some people run outside to watch iron dome shoot down the missile.

How well does the iron dome work? I assume it works pretty well if it's a spectacle.

Note these siren went off because they "detected" chemical weapons in the air. Why aren't they still be going off today - because they weren't detectors, it was someone pressing a button at random times for PSYOPS