Vince Brannigan wrote:
[....]
People "believed" it because el Busho said it was so. It wasnt so.

Whjat we dont knwo yet is whether Busho was lying or delusional

Now, Vince, that is falling prey to your own political mindset.
Not everything is reducable to such politically naive pandering.

In reality, a very large portion of the people who paid
attention to the Iraqi WMD threat from the early through
mid and late 1990s all agreed that it was likely that Iraq
still had hidden some materials and had obviously hidden
large amounts of information. Many of us believed that
from 1991 and 1992, long before G W Bush had run for
Governor in Texas much less for president.

There were large, known gaps in the information provided
UNSCOM and then UNMOVIC, and in the information they were
able to take during inspections. Some of those were gaps
where it appears in retrospect that the Iraqis truly had
just destroyed records and they're gone; interviews with
the participants on the Iraqi side, done post-Iraqi
Freedom, indicate that a lot of them claim that's what
happened. But they weren't allowed to fully disclose the
details prior to Iraqi Freedom and nobody believed them,
not the US, UNMOVIC, the UN Security Council, France,
Russia, etc.

It appears likely that the reason they weren't allowed to
fully disclose them, and that the Iraqi government didn't
cooperate with the inspections regime fully at any point,
was that Iraq followed a conscious strategy of both
disarming (at least functionally, though some bits and
pieces were left and were discovered throughout the 1990s)
and maintaining a large scale deception program to maintain
a deterrent belief in their neighbors' (and internal
minorities and dissidents) minds as to whether they were
really completely disarmed or not.

Liberals who are anti-war often refuse to acknowledge
the existence of a long and quite detailed history of
investigations and evidence which quite credibly would
lead an independent thinker to conclude that Iraq was
in fact hiding a real program. Hans Blix spent many
years convinced there was in fact something there,
though he changed his mind before the war when it
appeared that his conclusions might be used to justfiy
the war, which he didn't want to happen.

It is probably true that the majority of the population
didn't care one way or the other until Bush put forwards
his belief and made a point of it. It is a grossly
misinformed lie that nobody had education and belief on
the issue prior to then, and that nobody agreed with the
conclusion prior to then.

The implications of Saddam Hussein's deception program having
been successful in fooling those of us (including in the US
government, and outside) who thought the threat was real,
are a serious problem. We did not have good enough solid enough
intelligence on what was really happening. But the problem
was clearly a very hard one: penetrating a program in a hostile
warlike country, in which the leadership had committed itself
to maintaining a deception as a matter of national urgent
priority, and was willing to kill and torture to help cover
up what it was really doing.

In the end, Saddam could have ended the deception at any point
since 1991 and, after a reasonably short verification program,
ended the sanctions and the threats of ongoing violence and
war which eventually escalated to the US invasion. He chose
not to comply materially until the US had already given up on
peaceful options and committed to launch the war. That decision
and the consequences lie on his head.

Knowing what we knew pre-war, the conclusion that he was
still hiding a WMD program was well supported and reasonable.
Not universally agreed with, but well supported and reasonable.
And at least largely wrong, as we now know.


-george william herbert