Even President Bush repeated this today, saying no weapon were found. I will never, ever understand this administration unwillingness to defend itself.
The correct answer, no spin, is that we identified a very active weapons program and many laboratories, small scale weapons, etc. We unfortunately, did not uncover a huge arsenal ready to be deployed as the intelligence had predicted, but the programs were in place to expand the production in a short period of time.
This is a perfectly acceptable answer...it would have satisfied a lot of people.
See my post above yours.
In any war there are things which have to be kept secret, lest informers and others be compromised.
What is amazingly galling is how the press acted as if it was the final arbiter of everything regarding Iraq and the War on Terror when it was probably privy to only a miniscule fraction of the big picture.
I was going to make the same point. Your suggested answer is the correct one, with maybe an addition that some intelligence suggests that weapons were moved out of the country before the invasion.
I’ve said this several times before, and I still suspect that the reason Bush bought into the “no-WMD” story so early and stuck to it was simple: it was more important to discourage Al Queda from sending teams out into desert depots looking for them.
Remember that the Bush admin didn’t just buy-in to that story, they *sold* it earnestly from the very beginning. There were even a few stories of WMD stocks being found in the initial invasion but these stories were squelched and denied immediately.
It’s also possible that there are still ongoing searches happening in some locations around Iraq. I recall Iraq being described not as having many ammo depots, but basically the whole country *being* an ammo depot with literally tens of thousands of locations to examine. It could take years to fully check out the whole place. And yet... the story was sold right after the invasion that there was nothing to be found. How could they have known this? They couldn’t. But it wasn’t worth the risk that there might be something out there to be found and having lots of bad guys out there trying to get ahead of you.
Just a thought.
Add to this that there was that interesting little raid by “Israelis” deep into Syria’s Bekaa Valley a while back that incinerated lots of stuff... and Syria was amazingly quiet about the whole affair. A nuclear plant? Really? Anything else there perhaps that the Syrians didn’t want known to have been there? And maybe if we’d shut up they would too? Another thought.