1 More WMD thought. One other thing... There was enough "intelligence" to convince the UN Security council since the last Gulf War to pass 14 resolutions regarding the WMD issue in Iraq. So the fact that Bush said there are/were WMD in Iraq wasn't some new, unique perspective. His unique point, was that the 'threat to use the WMD' was real enough to take action.

Now all the hype is about "finding the WMD", but in reality the reason we went to war was to eliminate the threat of using the WMD. Whether they exist or not is a tangential issue.

The UN believed they had the weapons, hence the deployment of the inspection teams. The thing that exacerbated the issue was Iraqi officials saying that they didn't have weapons, but not letting the inspectors verify those statements. It's hard to take someone at their word, when they are going out of their way to stop you from verifying it.