There was no argument that in this film, WMD's were deployed and ready to launch in Iraq. It wasn't until politicians started to try and lie about the real existence of WMD's that they all disappeared into the back pages of the major newspapers.
shareNobody said that was Iraq. Actually in 1988 that would have probably been Iran.
shareIt's Iran. They point to the map in the movie and it's a place in southwestern Iran (in the original movie it was Libya).
Those two countries were our major enemies in the Middle-East at the time. We'd been very careful not to demonize Saddam Hussein until the Gulf War, since he was the one fighting Khomeini (of 1979 revolution and hostage crisis fame). To most of the public, he was viewed as an ally, not unlike Musharraf in the last decade.
Denny Crane.