First off, what I was in favor of was the final European proposal for intensive weapons inspectors, and keeping the US in line with international law. It would have been better to have removed Saddam with international support.

That said, while the estimates of how far along Saddam had gotten were wrong, that's because he did all he could to frustrate UN weapons inspectors for a decade.

If you read the CIA report on Iraq WMD development, you find that Saddam did everything he could get away with to develop WMD, and to hide it, and that he intended to start back up again seriously the first time he got a chance.

This story is a red herring, a diversion from the true misjudgement. Where the Bush Jr administration went wrong was in throwing out the State Department plan for transitioning Iraq to democracy. The insurgency did not start in earnest until Iraq's economy collapsed, and there's a whole lot of DC lobbyists who are going to burn in hell for trying to steal from the Iraqi people, including most particularly their oil. Their efforts led to the needless deaths and injuries of a lot of people, including a lot of US troops, and it took what, around 2 years, for the administration to bring an end to it. While to the administration's credit they finally did, but it took one hell of a long time.

That's the true scandal here, and what I expect is that if (no, make that when) Bush leans on Israel on territory, this story is going to get dumped on him - look for it...

and by the way, we still have not gotten to everything that Saddam tried to pull off. You can be sure that in addition to the regular Iraq WMD programs, he personally had his own little private efforts going on...

the town floats on a sea of shit...

ep