It doesn't look like Iraq had weapons of mass destruction at the time the United States invaded it.

Chief U.S. Weapons Inspector David Kay, who once believed that he would find such weapons, now says that the evidence points to Iraq having destroyed what weapons it had.
In short, maybe the much-faulted United Nations weapons inspection process was working after all.

There is no question that Iraq once had a working biological and chemical weapons program — and that Saddam Hussein has had a great interest in developing nuclear weapons.

But did Iraq have them when the United States went to war?

Here's what Kay told Congress: The U.S. intelligence reports from Iraq were wrong. There were no "large stockpiles" of biological and chemical weapons, and no evidence of a working nuclear weapons program. U.S. analysts relied on information gathered by the United Nations inspection team from 1991 to 1998 rather than developing human sources of information on the ground in Iraq.

"I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they estimated. Reality on the ground differed."

The war was sold to the American public and the world diplomatic community on the basis of those weapons of mass destruction.

While there were other reasons to want to get rid of the regime of Saddam, who had used chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers and on his own people in the past, it was the imminent threat posed by weapons of mass destruction that formed the basis for the U.S. war effort. But that's only one problem with the decision to go to war. The other was the unilateral way in which we went about it, and the disparaging way top U.S. officials treated longtime U.S. allies when they expressed misgivings about the war.

We can't leave Iraq in the shape that it's in. It would be irresponsible, after having toppled the government and leaving a power vacuum, to simply pull out our troops and bring them home.

Iraq needs stability, and it needs a process by which free elections can be held and a new Iraqi government set up by the Iraqi people themselves.

But we need to question not only the state of U.S. intelligence but also the wisdom of unilateral wars.

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