I'm a young Gen Xer and IIRC it was clear to half the country that the whole WMD story was bullshit, but for a lot of people that bit of clarity came in hindsight after the initial invasion.

I used to joke that Dubya used 9/11 as an excuse to "finish Daddy's work", given that even after the Gulf War Hussein continued to reign for 10 more years. But when Halliberton suddenly started getting all these contract jobs securing oil wells, it was pretty obvious what was going on at that point.

Its strange because I remember there was initial talks about going to Afghanistan to search for Bin Laden, but then suddenly the discussion shifted to the whole bullshit WMD story. IIRC the assigned UN commission that was supposed to do their annual inspections for nuclear and chemical weapons, found nothing during their visit to Iraq just a few months prior, but those chucklefucks in the WH kept pushing the narrative anyway. The Whitehouse did such a half assed job of getting their stories straight, I was sure someone was going to fuck up at some point, but the media kept pushing the assigned narrative and the public bought it.