"Was Iraq behaving like a nation that had destroyed all its weapons in the early 1990s? "

No it wasn't, rather it was playing brinksmanship and losing. It's quite simple, Saddam was an idiot- nasty, vile, disgusting, but nevertheless he was an idiot- which has had the happy consequent of the Iraqis now being free to form a new govt- and hopefully we can help them not make the same mistake as they did before and/or same mistakes as some other countries have made.

As far as the rest of what you quoted. I see nothing new. The problem wasn't that UN inspectors were incompetent, it was the Saddam was not cooperating with the UN inspectors, THAT'S what we couldn't wait for- Saddam changing his mind and deciding to fully cooperate with the UN inspectors. If the UN inspectors were very talented, and there were even a whole army of them, the Saddam regime could still thwart all their effort for decades.