In Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack", the issue of WMD was discussed heavily based on accounts from candid White House interviews with Colin Powell et al. About halfway through the book, the issue takes center stage. Condi Rice, amongst others in late 2002, said that regime change to liberate the Iraqi people was too weak a catalyst for war. Strangely, that remains the only remaining excuse these days. And the terrorist angle was hogwash from the very beginning. So the case for WMD was made.
Dick Cheney in providing strategy for the U.N. Security Council vote on pressuring Saddam to disarm, devised a catch-22 strategy in which Iraq was screwed no matter their response. According to Woodward, if they said, "We don't have weapons," we'd claim they were lying. If they said, "We HAVE weapons," we'd claim they'd been lying since the Gulf War.
The whole climate was one of cooking a strategic excuse for war in Iraq based on WMD.
Clearly, there were no weapons. And the search has ended. The Washington Post:
The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.
And Bush is sad.
Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House has been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country.
Despite the Duelfer Report which made it clear that Saddam had no weapons since the first Gulf War, the talking point has gone out to claim that he somehow got rid of all his weapons in the interim. Clifford May, of the National Review and the President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (a right-wing think tank), appeared on CNN this morning to begin the revisionist history drum beat.
Meanwhile, if you make a mistake as slight as showing up late for work today you might be fired.