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I'm going to go to my grave not knowing the answer to this mystery.

Oh you don't need to wait that long. Far from it.

We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability," Bush tells Pelley

Imagine that. Guess the President doesn't read World Nut Daily and the Weakly Standard. Crazy Joe and fence rider Bill Kristol could have told him all he needed to know. Maybe you could send him some of the fine weblinks to nonsenical suppositions that have been shown as 'evidence' since 2003.

Actually, I could make an argument for why the administration doesn't talk about the knowledge that WMD went to Syria.

And I could make an argument that they were really in the land of Nod being carefully guarded by Puff the Magic Dragon. Both would hold the same amount of truth to them.

Note, I am not blaming the President. He seems like a decent sort, probably moreso than he has in a long time. But it's clearer by the day the idiots surrounding him had an agenda from day one. I'm not going to label him a conservative but he's not a bad guy either.

I think it's very likely that Saddam had a serious nuclear weapons program operating before the invasion. How advanced and effective that program really was is open to debate, but IMO an operating nuclear weapons program is the only reason why we would do a full-scale invasion. VP Cheney said on TV that Saddam had restarted his nuclear weapons program, and Cheney knows what he's talking about. We have not talked much about this program since the invasion, probably because all the hard evidence of lab equipment and partially enriched unranium was removed by Russia before the invasion to keep it away from Syria and Iran. Any useful equipment left behind probably went to Syria before the invasion.

When you're a Republican president you can't show empty lab rooms to the media and say "this is where Saddam was working on nukes." Clinton could get away with that, but not a Republican. Bush was not surrounded by idiots. The situation is much more complex than the public could every imagine and few people spend enough time analyzing the facts to figure out what really happened.

Another idea to keep in mind is that some of the best evidence for Saddam's WMD programs probably came from informants and through the powerful electronic surveillance capabilities of the NSA. We can't disclose publicly evidence from informants, because of course that would put their lives in danger and make it very difficult to recruit informants in other countries in the future. We also cannot disclose most of the information gathered by the NSA, because that would allow Saddam's regime to deduce some of the capabilities of the NSA, i.e., what kind of communications we are able to intercept. If they figured out some of these capabilities, they could tell the whole world and then rogue regimes like Iran would start to take counter-measures to make it more difficult to do electronic surveillance on them. So the NSA could lose the effectiveness of some of it's methods, and in this era of nuclear weapons, losing some of those methods could be disastrous some day.

Withholding sensitive intelligence from the public is called "protecting sources and methods." It made Bush's job much more difficult but that's all part of the burden of the Presidency.