Here:

...To be sure, none of this proves that Saddam's agents sought uranium for use in nuclear weapons. What it proves is that reasonable people had good reason to believe that that's what Saddam's agents were doing. Just as reasonable people had good reason to believe that Iraq was armed with biological or chemical weapons. Remember: That was the deeply held consensus of the US intelligence community. It was affirmed by Republicans and Democrats, by Americans and Europeans, by the Bush administration and the Clinton administration, and by a unanimous UN Security Council.

Only in the wake of Iraq's liberation has it become fashionable to assert not just that there were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but that only a liar would have said there were. And only now have the media, in their eagerness to discredit Bush, been reluctant to cover stories that prove otherwise.

Intelligence failures are not the same thing as lies. And intelligence failures about Iraqi WMD did not begin with the Bush administration. It is worth recalling that the CIA was way off the mark in its estimates of Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs before the first Iraq war, too. It turned out then that Saddam was a much more dangerous WMD menace than the experts had realized. This time around, the experts may have overestimated the threat.

But if intelligence mistakes are inevitable, is it better to worry too much about potential threats or to worry too little? Worrying too much -- if that's what happened -- resulted in the toppling of one of the planet's most murderous tyrants. Worrying too little resulted in 9/11.