wrote:

The professional intelligence groups were saying that they could not
verify that WMD actually existed and Cheney and company just could not
believe it, given Hussein's retoric. They didn't think it was
possible that he was nothing more than a sadistic blowhard. But it
appears that is in fact what he was.

The "professional intelligence groups" were pretty much unanimous in
stating that it was almost certain that Iraq had massive stores of
WMD, and certainly had the ability to produce lots more in short
order. The UN weapons inspection report just before the war concluded
that it was nearly certain they were sitting on 10,000 liters of
viable anthrax, for example (not that the 10 second snippets from Hans
Blix would have led the average news viewer to understand that).

I really, really hope you're right and that somehow his WMDs had gone
inert - though that wouldn't make a lot of sense given the known Iraqi
abilities in production of WMDs.

Mark Hickey