There are two sets of fact in conflict: Bush Administration claims of factual knowledge of WMD in Iraq before the war; and the failure to find the WMD after the war. That's the hard truth Bush faces.

What about the option that Bush, like every other president, made his decisions based on the best available information? Bush didn't generate those intel estimates himself nor does he have the means to verify them himself, ScrappleFace to the contrary. He has a host of government agencies like the CIA, NSA, NIMA, DIA, and an alphabet soup of other organizations to provide him the information. In addition, we share intelligence with friendly nations like Britain who have their own resources.

Inspite of billions spend each year to gather intelligence, it's still more an art than a science. A lot of it is little more than educated guesswork by analysts who do their best to make sense of a variety of sources, including some whose reliability is suspect like that forged document.

There are some facts about WMD that are known:

1. Saddam had them in the past. We know this because he used them in the past.

2. Saddam eventually admitted to having nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. This was verified by UN weapons inspections in the 1990s.

3. UNSCR 1441 called for full disclosure. Saddam failed to comply. Why, if he had destroyed all of those WMD that he had previously admitted to, didn't he disclose that fact to the UN inspectors? He not only could've stopped any planned military operations against his country, he probably would've had the sanctions lifted in no time.

Given that the weapons were known to exist before and lacking any evidence of their destruction, is doesn't seem like a stretch to conclude that he still had the weapons.

Now, the question is what happened to Saddam's WMD? Did he really destroy them without telling anyone? If so, there should be some evidence at the destruction site. Did he hide them to keep them away from the inspectors? If so, then they should turn up sooner or later. In a country the size of California, there are a lot of places to hide stuff. The more scary possibility is that he slipped the stuff out of the country, perhaps to Syria. If that happened, then we can only hope to find out about it and retrieve the stuff before it falls into the wrong hands.

Someone questioned a day or so ago whether he could've slipped the stuff out of the country given the level of surveillance that was ongoing at the time. That's a reasonable question. Surveillance is never complete or continuous over an area that large. Remember, it wasn't until well after the inspections began last year that U-2 flights were authorized over Iraq. Imagery satellites are low flyers in predictable orbits. They're only over the target area for a few minutes at a time and those times are easily predictable. Other forms of reconnaissance satellites such as signals intelligence systems can also be defeated by couriers and fiber optics. Stuff like drums of chemicals can be smuggled in ordinary trucks and no one has the ability to see inside of them.