No one thought the weapons of mass destruction were fake and lied and said they were real.
The conspiracy was "These were simply people who were convinced they were on the right track." so did not allow competing theories.
Exactly the same with the VW emissions issue.
This is exactly how conspiracies and cabals work. They are emergent behaviour.
Article is great to, came to post something along the lines of "no it wasn't a conspiracy", but the article summerises exactly what happened under the picture - "Amyloid plaques have long been the suspected cause of cognitive decline experienced by Alzheimer’s patients. Drug companies have spent billions of dollars creating amyloid-targeting drugs, yet they’ve all failed"
->They went "all in" on bad science.
They went "all in" on science, that happens with hindsight to maybe not have been an accurate model for reality. Nobody can know that a particular explanation is bad without actually doing the science first, no matter what post facto explanations we can come up with after we realize we've been chasing a unicorn.
no particular judgement, but saying "mistakes were made" would be something of an understatement.
No, conspiracies and cabal are by their very nature intentional. Groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink is a much better term for describing an emergent dysfunctional decision process brought on through social dynamics.
It's really hard to find non-fiction examples of cabals, but when applied to real life I stick with they are almost always emergent behaviour.
I would have thought the Phoebus cartel is an example of a cabal, but it seems Google doesn't agree.
But it's an example of progress kept back from emergent behaviour.
There's a reason there's two memes attached to Phoebus cartel, 1. They stopped long lasting light bulbs, 2. Actually long lasting light bulbs burn to much electricity.
The emergent behaviour from 2. caused 1. which made them more money.
This is not Groupthink.
An independent science lab causd the VW scandal by publishing independent measures of emissions. That's one way the process of science corrects itself.
Not totally sold on the meme, but looking at crossovers between disciplines is a thing.
Although I'd argue it's all under anthropology in this case.
I'm not justifying the actions of the administration or even the legal basis for it, but per my understanding, the claims were not untrue, notwithstanding how it was sold to the us public (especially as filtered by the complicit media)
There's also plenty of evidence that Iraq had (known, small) stockpiles of chemical weapons, too (last I checked those were classed as WMD), which are widely accepted to be a likely cause of gulf war syndrome and a contributing factor to congenital disease in some parts of iraq.
Mind you: I'm not claiming that it's ethical to invade a country on shoddy pretenses.
Of course at one old point Iraq had WMD programs. But you were completely misrepresenting the situation by stating for the later period that "The funny thing about that conspiracy is that the WMD were real. Hussein had them, and and its true that he didn't give them up". Even the very article you linked stated clearly: "There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said." As for the small amount of chemical weapons or precursors, they also have not been interpreted afterwhile has having any significance regarding the willingness to comply.
Saddam also received considerable material support from the US during the Iran-Iraq War -- those pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand aren't fake. Lots of jokes about "we knew Saddam had WMDs cuz we gave em to him!" were, to a degree, credible on paper.
Saddam had long since stopped working on them, but made a point to look like he was. This allowed him to drum up support by posturing like he was standing up to the US, and also to look threatening to the Iranians (plus the Kurds + Shias).