Oops! We were all wrong. Our bad.
That’s essen­tially what David Kay, for­mer chief weapons inspec­tor, said today when he tes­ti­fied before the Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee.

Let me begin by say­ing, we were almost all wrong, and I cer­tainly include myself here.
Sen. [Edward] Kennedy knows very directly. Sen­a­tor Kennedy and I talked on sev­eral occa­sions prior to the war that my view was that the best evi­dence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruc­tion.
I would also point out that many gov­ern­ments that chose not to sup­port this war — cer­tainly, the French pres­i­dent, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq’s pos­ses­sion of WMD.
The Ger­mans cer­tainly — the intel­li­gence ser­vice believed that there were WMD.
It turns out that we were all wrong, prob­a­bly in my judg­ment, and that is most disturbing.

No one was pres­sured, he said, to come up with evi­dence that wasn’t there. “Never — not in a sin­gle case — was the expla­na­tion, ‘I was pres­sured to do this,’” he said. “The expla­na­tion was very often, ‘The lim­ited data we had led one to rea­son­ably con­clude this. I now see that there’s another expla­na­tion for it.’”
And Iraq was in vio­la­tion of some aspects of “UNSCR 1441″:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000085.php#000085, which required Iraq to make a full dis­clo­sure of its uncon­ven­tional weapons and pro­grams.
One vio­la­tion included the dis­cov­ery of dozens of rock­ets capa­ble of car­ry­ing chem­i­cal war­heads and of fly­ing far­ther than allowed by the United Nations. “There was no evi­dence the war­heads them­selves had ever been filled” with chem­i­cals, but the rock­ets should have been reported to U.N. inspec­tors and destroyed, Kay said.
OK. Most of the West’s intel­li­gence ser­vices were wrong. No doubt about that. For the record, “I thought Sad­dam had chems and bios, too.”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000112.php#000112 But — and this was prob­a­bly the think­ing of the French and the Ger­mans — _what remained of the weapons and pro­grams didn’t war­rant going to war._ Sad­dam was con­tained, his strik­ing power was laugh­able. He wasn’t going to hook up with al Qaeda.
Kevin Drumm over at Calpun­dit has assem­bled a col­lec­tion of state­ments from peo­ple who weighed on on the WMD issue before the war. Some of them include:
For­mer British For­eign Sec­re­tary Robin Cook in his March 2003 res­ig­na­tion speech:

Iraq prob­a­bly has no weapons of mass destruc­tion in the com­monly under­stood sense of that term — namely, a cred­i­ble device capa­ble of being deliv­ered against strate­gic city tar­gets. It prob­a­bly does still have bio­log­i­cal tox­ins and bat­tle­field chem­i­cal muni­tions. But it has had them since the 1980s when the US sold Sad­dam the anthrax agents and the then British gov­ern­ment built his chem­i­cal and muni­tions factories.

As Kevin notes, the assump­tion is that Sad­dam had the WMD, but that they weren’t very dangerous.

Aus­tralian Intel­li­gence offi­cer Andrew Wilkie in March 2003:

Iraq’s weapons of mass destruc­tion pro­gram is, I believe, gen­uinely con­tained. There is no doubt they have chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons, but their pro­gram now is dis­jointed and lim­ited. It’s not a national WMD pro­gram like they used to have.

Again, the WMDs are there, just not much of a threat.
And so on, with the most skep­ti­cal voice com­ing from Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin say­ing in Octo­ber 2002 that it’s unlikely that any weapons exist, but even so, the Rus­sians worry that they might.
So every­one thought they were there, but only the Bush admin­is­tra­tion thought they were an immi­nent exis­ten­tial threat to the United States. (And for those who said the White House never said Iraq was an “immi­nent threat” because they didn’t utter the _actual words_ “immi­nent threat,” I roll my eyes at you. Just read this col­lec­tion of state­ments from mem­bers of the admin­is­tra­tion.)
The ques­tion that we have it answer is why did every­one else think Iraq was man­age­able while Wash­ing­ton didn’t? Sept. 11? Greed for Oil? Strate­gic posi­tion­ing in a new Great Game? Per­sonal grudges? Man­i­fest des­tiny in the sands of Ara­bia? I think it’s all of those and more. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion believed the worst about Iraq not because they had to but because they wanted to. For all of those rea­sons and goals, Iraq had to become the num­ber one tar­get. Was it a legit­i­mate one? In hind­sight, obvi­ously it appears no. At the time, I and oth­ers smarter than me argued that it wasn’t worth going to war over it. That the threat wasn’t immi­nent, that Iraq wasn’t worth the blood and trea­sure that would be paid.
The Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Progress has put up a dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique of the White House’s will­ful igno­rance regard­ing Iraq’s weapons. David Kay is, at best, play­ing the loyal sol­dier with this “faulty intel­li­gence” meme. “A review of the facts,” the Cen­ter says, “shows the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity repeat­edly warned the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion about the weak­ness of its case, but was cir­cum­vented, over­ruled, and ignored.“

• In 2001 and before, intel­li­gence agen­cies noted that Sad­dam Hus­sein was effec­tively con­tained after the Gulf War. In fact, for­mer weapons inspec­tor David Kay now admits that the pre­vi­ous pol­icy of con­tain­ment – includ­ing the 1998 bomb­ing of Iraq – destroyed any remain­ing infra­struc­ture of poten­tial WMD programs.
• Through­out 2002, the CIA, DIA, Depart­ment of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion that its selec­tive use of intel­li­gence was paint­ing a weak WMD case. Those warn­ings were repeat­edly ignored.
• Instead of lis­ten­ing to the repeated warn­ings from the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity, intel­li­gence offi­cials say the White House instead pres­sured them to con­form their reports to fit a pre-determined pol­icy. Mean­while, more evi­dence from inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions poured in that the White House’s claims were not well-grounded.

(Thanks to Hes­iod over at Coun­ter­spin Cen­tral for tip­ping me off on this time­line.)
Amer­i­cans will for­give pres­i­dents their hon­est mis­takes. But dis­hon­est state­ments backed up by will­ful igno­rance and an “I’m not lis­ten­ing, la-la-la-la-la!” atti­tude should never be tol­er­ated or for­given.
Bush lied. You know the rest.