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... and made a judgement then looked for evidence, rather than looking for evidence then making a judgement (the first will alwasy be a self serving cycle - particularly if you throw enough money at it).

Some key findings totally undermine your thesis with regard to our intel deficiency. The answer is prosaic, and all the more embarassing because it is in plain sight. Saddam, and his Russian advisers, were simply more clever and cunning than the American MSM Left gives him credit for.

Some telling points from Disinformation (although it should be pointed out that 9 miles of Iraqi Intel docs remain unreviewed, and Kay's team never left the Green Zone according to soldiers on the ground):

David Kay
Kay ran the Iraq Survey Group, a 1,400-man team charged with scour-ing Iraq for stockpiles of WMD. He did not find any. Yet he told a joint session of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in October 2003 that the Iraq Survey Group had “discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq had concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002, including chemical, biological, and nuclear experi-ments.” Kay testified that Iraq had tried to obtain missiles from North Korea on several occasions. He also said that his work was hampered by “six principal factors,” of which the first two were that “from birth, all of Iraq’s WMD activities were highly compartmentalized within a regime that ruled and kept its secrets through fear and terror and with deception and denial built into each program,” and “deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict.”26 What was being dispersed and hidden if there was “no evidence” that Iraq had WMD?

Even anti-war opponents such as Hans Blix's own report makes it clear that something is amiss with regard to the supposedly nonexistent WMD's:

They point to lack of evidence and inconsistencies, which raise question marks, which must be straightened out if weapons dossiers are to be closed and confidence is to arise.” If one keeps reading Blix’s reports, darker realities emerge. The inspectors could not account for Iraq’s 6,500 chemical weapons (which were missing) and couldn’t prove that Iraq had destroyed the anthrax it admitted it had produced. In short, according to Blix, some WMD were most likely still in Iraq’s arsenal. Blix said that inspectors had found evidence that Iraq had been producing VX nerve gas as well as a “mustard gas predecessor,” thiodiglycol.

Here instead is what NEEDS to be trumpeted in Presidential Televised Awards conferences...in PRIME TIME..., with MEDALS to the officers:

Polish general Marek Dukaczewski, Poland’s military intelligence chief, revealed that troops in the Polish-patrolled sector of Iraq had received tips from Iraqis that chemical weapons were sold to terror-ists on the black market. The weapons had been buried to avoid detection, the general told the BBC.5 Polish military officials bought seventeen chemical-weapons warheads from Iraqis for $5,000 each to keep them from Iraq’s so-called insurgents.6 “An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine,” the general said. “All of our activ-ity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads.”7 Tests confirmed that some of the warheads contained cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin. These chemical weapons were sup-posed to have been completely destroyed during the 1991–1998 UN inspector regime. Clearly, some WMD survived.
➢U.S. soldiers stormed into a warehouse in Mosul, Iraq, on August 8, 2005, and were surprised to find 1,500 gallons of chemical agents. It was the largest chemical weapons lab found in Iraq.8 The intelligence community remains divided over the origin of those chemical weapons (either from inside Iraq or outside) and whether they were made during Saddam’s regime or after.
➢When a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy on May 17, 2004, it was found to contain the nerve agent sarin.9 Army Brigadier Gen-eral Mark Kimmitt told reporters that an “improvised explosive” was rigged to a 155 mm artillery shell that contained sarin. The shell was a “binary chemical projectile,” in which the two ingredients that pro-duce sarin are separated by a propeller blade that spins while the shell is in flight, mixing the deadly gas to full potency. Since the chemical weapons shell was used as a bomb, and not fired from the barrel of an artillery piece, the internal rotor did not spin and the deadly agent was not widely dispersed. As a result, Kimmitt explained, only traces of sarin were produced and released. The soldiers were briefly hospital-ized and decontaminated. Again, all such chemical weapons warheads were supposed to be destroyed in 1991—yet Saddam’s WMD still threaten the lives of American troops to this day.