"As far as I can tell, most Americans are simply not admitting to themselves that our country made a monumental and inexcusable mistake."

You mean where the CIA didn't predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, despite majority of it's assets being allocated to detect just such a possiblity?

As far as Iraq: Saddam Hussein did not comply with cease fire agreement specifically in regards to section regarding WMD.
This is undisputable.
This doesn't require a multi billion dollar CIA bureaucracy to tell you:
Saddam Hussein kicked the UN inspector out of his country, this all by itself was a violation of cease fire agreement. Saddam Hussein never disclosed the extent of his WMD program but left it to inspector to find specific violations, this failure to disclose the WMD programs is a violation of cease fire agreement. After dozen years the UN inspector were unable to verify that Saddam Hussein's regime had fully complied with the cease fire agreement- this isn't mostly the UN inspector's fault but rather the fault of regime that made their jobs more difficult. If Saddam had wanted to end the war, he could have chosen to do everything humanly possible to help these inspectors. 12 year is plenty of time for even the most incompetent regime, so this delay was also violation of the cease fire agreement.
And finally no one could give any clear idea of when Saddam's regime would or even if it was ever going to be willing to fully comply with the cease fire agreement.

The idea that because no stockpiles were found; that somehow this translates into Saddam *actually* complying with the cease fire agreement- is not correct. If Saddam had sold these stockpiles he would have violated the cease fire agreement. His ownership rights to do what he wanted to do with this property was forfeited because he lost a war in which he invaded Kuwait. In addition to losing this specific ownership he had the debt of getting all this stuff collected and gather all the documents related to it, so that UN inspectors could have a high confidence that Saddam was acting in good faith and was not has hiding more stuff which would be a violation of the agreement.
The simple answer was thug/theif didn't want to admit he lost a war, and that he *had* to follow an agreement- big mistake.

The story of Iraqi WMD and the Gulf war is now mostly over. The moral of this story is if you sign a cease fire agreement in which the US is a party to, it would be wise to quickly and fully comply with the goddamn agreement or your tin horn dictorship ass could find yourself hiding in a spiderhole in which you could be found and arrested.

Iraq is not Saddam Hussein. Mr Hussein is a murdering thug who robbed, murdered, and poorly governed the Iraqi people. The US led coalition has now brought about full compliance to the cease fire agreement. Saddam Hussein is in jail where he belongs. Iraqi can now freely govern their nation.

Americans did not make a mistake, the people who made the mistake were those who thought they could use the UN to stop America from doing something which was considered to be in American's national interest [holy crap, how delusional are these folks, anyhow?].