And I'm not talking about the CIA, but the Democrats who are all excited that there are no WMD and think it proves that Bush was wrong and they are right. Well, that would be true if they had argued against the war by saying Saddam didn't actually have WMD and he wasn't a danger. By they didn't say that. Their anti-war argument was that we shouldn't do it without the OK of the UN and France. Even opponents of the war agreed that Saddam had WMD and was a threat to his neighbors, hence UN Resolution 1441, statements by Clinton and his administration and the 1998 overwhelming vote in favor of regime change in Congress.
And as for the other alleged intelligence failure on the part of the international intelligence community, whether from the CIA, the British, the Germans or whoever, I'm not convinced it was a failure. Not because I think that there really were WMDs (although there may be), but because it is unreasonable to expect foreign intelligence agents to know more about the inner workings of highly secretive programs of a police state than the chief of that police state himself knew. Saddam thought he had WMDs, how would we possibly get better information than the tyrant who could threaten the liars with death by shredding?
Christopher Hitchens tells us that we should be happy with the actions we took, in Slate:
This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change. And the knowledge that Iraq can be finally and fully certified as disarmed, and that it won't be able to rearm under a Caligula regime, is surely a piece of knowledge worth having in its own right and for its own sake.
