The most blatant attempt to rewrite history is the effort to convince everyone that before the war, only Bush and his cronies believed Saddam had WMD, or worse, didn't believe it either and lied about it.

In point of fact, before the war, almost everyone believed Saddam had WMD, including two administrations and the intelligence agencies of at least two nations.

The position of the vast majority of antiwar people was that Saddam had such weapons, but that war was not the way to disarm him. Anyone telling you different is lying.

CEIP was no exception.

Read the papers on <a href="http://www.ceip.org/files/publications/iraq/mathews.htm>this CEIP website. Don't forget to check out the links. Does this sound like they believe Saddam had no WMD?:

With rising emphasis in recent months, the president has made clear that the United States' number one concern in Iraq is its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). No link has yet been found between Baghdad's assertively secular regime and radical Islamist terrorists. There is much else about the Iraqi government that is fiercely objectionable but nothing that presents an imminent threat to the region, the United States, or the world. Thus, the United States' primary goal is, and should be, to deal with the WMD threat.

In light of what is now a four-year-long absence of international inspectors from the country, it has been widely assumed that the United States has only two options regarding that threat: continue to do nothing to find and destroy Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs, or pursue covert action or a full-scale military operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At best, the latter would be a unilateral initiative with grudging partners.

This paper proposes a third approach, a middle ground between an unacceptable status quo that allows Iraqi WMD programs to continue and the enormous costs and risks of an invasion. It proposes a new regime of coercive international inspections. A powerful, multinational military force, created by the UN Security Council, would enable UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams to carry out "comply or else" inspections. The "or else" is overthrow of the regime. The burden of choosing war is placed squarely on Saddam Hussein.

Don't forget to check out the links. Trythis one:

Although UNSCOM and AT-IAEA were able to confirm many Iraqi claims and in some cases produce a technically coherent picture of past WMD activities, after almost eight years of intensive work they were never able to claim complete, or even sufficient, knowledge. When disarmament work was halted in 1998, the commission considered Iraq's ballistic missile, CW, and BW declarations to be incomplete and inaccurate. The myriad lingering questions and areas of uncertainty fall roughly into two categories. First, investigators are uncertain of the completeness of Iraqi declarations: It appears that Iraq has not declared all relevant activities and materials. Barring significant, good faith Iraqi cooperation, quantitative accounting for proscribed materials will remain incomplete. Similarly, Iraq's effort to conceal know-how, technical capabilities, and WMD-related infrastructure calls into question the investigator's qualitative knowledge of the weapons programs. Although a complete qualitative knowledge is not specifically necessary for disarmament accounting, it is a critical component of the long-term monitoring of Iraq's dual-use infrastructure. Iraq's policy of concealment and its known past efforts to retain proscribed items serve to magnify these uncertainties as they may represent just the tips of icebergs.

The fact that we have learned more after we invaded the country has nothing to do with how decisions had to be made prior to the war.

Just as an extra, here's a pre-war opinion from another think tank.

None of this will make a dent in you, I know, but hopefully others will find this useful.