The idea that Saddam had nuclear weapons seems like more of a conspiracy theory to me, since there was never a single piece of evidence for it. Saddam did have chemical weapons that USA helped him use against Iran, but experts agreed their shelf life had expired and they had aged to the point of uselessness by 2003. Lots of other nations that haven't been invaded do have "WMDs", so anyone reasonable would certainly suspect "another reason".

I don't recall the official line ever being 'nuclear weapons'. It was always 'chemical weapons', which were redefined to be 'weapons of mass destruction' in order to then be grouped with nuclear weapons and have some of that fear become associated with them. The irony, of course, was seen in the US bragging about going into Iraq with the largest conventional munition ever made, the MOAB (mother-of-all-bombs).

The Iraq war was used to bolster voters for the next year's election - the US had been punching ghosts and getting nowhere in Afghanistan after 9/11, so they switched targets to one that looked similarly foreign and, more importantly, couldn't hide.

You don't recall all the back-and-forth about the IAEA? Hans Blix had visited this site and El Baradei had visited that site? Really? Do you actually remember that time, or do you just remember later reporting about it? Because in the news I watched in 2002-3, it was all IAEA all the time.

Yep, I remember that, and the inspections had a timeline that would have concluded in several months after the US invasion started. The US's allies were asking it to wait for those inspections to conclude.

Then, of course, the US ignored them because "he's going to hide the evidence", invaded for its own reasons... and famously found nothing. Blix was painted as an incompetent by the US, but even after stomping Iraq into dust and having full control of the country, the US found nothing.

Yep, lots of people were wrong about this. Being wrong is not evil though.

It certainly can be, and in this case it was. The GWB administration kept ignoring evidence and demanding new evidence until finally evidence could be manufactured that fit their policy goals. (This isn't a partisan judgment, since this tragedy was repeated as farce in the lead-up to the Democrat Party's war in Libya. Still, leaving the Libyans to their own devices after the horrible meaningless unprovoked war has probably been better for everyone than what we've done instead in Iraq.)

Have you ever heard of Project for a New American Century?