Between Saddam's attempt to convince others that he was armed and dangerous, and the scientists' attempts to convince their superiors that they were successfully building WMD, an environment was created where even Iraq's military leaders and others high in the heirarchy were convinced that Iraq possessed an arsenal of deployable weapons of mass destruction.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that, through the fuzzy filter of satellite photos, reports from defectors, attempts by Iraqi scientists to deceive, and a solid and provable background of Iraq's manufacture, possession and use of WMD (including a full-up nuclear weapons program), that intelligence agencies might unavoidably come to the same conclusions held by much of the leadership of Iraq.

The key point here is that many intelligence agencies other than the CIA came to exactly the same conclusions. If you have been bothering to actually listen to what Kay has been saying (and I've been pointing this out for weeks), almost EVERYONE in the intelligence community throughout the world thought Saddam had WMD before the war. The political controversy was how to disarm him, not that he needed disarming.

If only the CIA had come to this conclusion, while all the other agencies came to the opposite conclusion, we could fairly lay the blame on CIA incompetence.

The Left doesn't like this answer, because it fails to provide for their only objective, which is laying the blame solely at the feet of George W. Bush.