I think it may be somewhat simpler than that. I just think that the Iraqi government was a bumbling two-bit bureaucracy that failed to keep accurate records of their forced disarmament after Gulf War I. GW-I had decimated the Iraqi military and goverment infrastructure and they were truly incapable of accounting for practically anything. And, it appears that Saddam had put more money into building palaces than into post-war reconstruction. The U.N. inspectors kept asking for documentation he simply couldn't produce. On top of that it appears that our estimates of what he may have possessed in the way of chemical and biological weapons at the time may have been grossly exaggerated, in part because Saddam's own people had exaggerated what they had originally produced in order to keep the "boss" happy.

As for why he was so uncooperative to U.N. inspectors, well think about this...we still have stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in this country. How would you personally feel if the U.N. or France and Germany demanded you let them them in to look at them? We tend to forget just how fiercely nationalistic Saddam was. Perhaps his lack of cooperation was merely his unwillingness to submit to the demands of other nations and allow foreign inspectors (some of whom he suspected to be spies) into his classified military and industrial facilities as well as his personal palaces - even if he had nothing to hide.

The case for war was based upon the premise that the hundreds of tons of chemical and biologicial weapons he had produced BEFORE GW-I were still stockpiled somewhere. Our "evidence" for this was the lack of documentation that these materials had been destroyed. Perhaps that's because the Iraqi regime failed to accurately document their disarmameent of these weapons. Perhaps we based the case for war merely on incompetent bookkeeping.