Sorry, Tom, but I don't buy it. For one thing, in the run up to the war, you have Mr. Hussein emphatically denying he had weapons of mas destruction. And after the war you have any number of high level Iraqi offiicials denying that Iraq had such weapons.

The most reasonable explanation is that Iraq did, indeed, destroy its WMD's in the early to mid-1990's but failed to adequately document its actions. Fact is, after the first Gulf War, Iraq was a shambles. Its infrastructure had been decimated and it bureaucracy left in shambles. They probably kept few, if any, records of their disarmament. Keep in mind that a nation that has to bury its few remaining jets in the sand in order to hide its rather emaciated "air force" had got little capacity or competence to do just about anything right.

As for Saddam's "irrational behavior," I think that's readily explained by his visions of grandeur and self-importance that far and away exceeded reality. In addition, weapons inspections were attempting to access every nook and cranny in Iraq. No doubt some of these locations involved legitimate security interests for the government. Other locations involved evidence of atrocities agains his own people. Saddam's lack of full cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors can be readily explained by these circumstances.