"Twilight of the Bombs" opens with a recounting of the time period between the Gulf and Iraq wars. In this period the US discovers that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear weapons program and gets the international community heavily involved in shutting it down.

While this was successful, the US government was aggressively involved in trying to learn everything they could about the program (people, places, research notes) so that they could double check and make absolutely sure everything was shut down. Saddam's gov eventually gets frustrated with this level of invasiveness and doesn't want to list high value military locations for fear of letting Iran know about them. The records end up getting destroyed.

Saddam's gov thought "Hey, we burned all the notes involved in the weapons program, there's no way we can restart." Hawks in the US admin thought "They're hiding something that they don't want us to know about, they must still have a weapons program".

Notable Hawks who took this position in the H.W. Bush admin were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who went on to hold offices of higher power in the W. Bush admin.

So it goes.

https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Pro...