No surprise here: US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD. Of course, Iraq has roughly the same square mileage as California. Finding a cache of WMD that could fit in a basement in a land area that big could be impossible without help from someone who knows where to look. So "knowing" that no WMD had been immediately found back in May after inspecting the most likely hotspots doesn't prove there were none anywhere.

Still, it seems far more likely that GWB felt compelled to depose Saddam for other reasons - both personal and humanitarian. Saddam only killed about a million people, so he isn't quite in the same league as Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, but it is hard to imagine that the world would be any better off if he were still in power. The problem with staging an invasion for humanitarian reasons is that the UN doesn't agree that's a legitimate reason. So we have to trot out the old "direct threat to our national security" justification. Saddam at least played ball by flouting all 17 UN resolutions directed at revealing any WMD inside Iraq.

It's a shame that Bush could not stage an invasion for "Manifest-Destiny-Humanitarian" reasons. In the arcane calculus of world politics, it is better to endure the slaughter of a million people at the hands of a despot than to allow a more powerful nation to put an end to the brutality by force. So now we get to watch the media harp endlessly about the lack of WMD and how totally unjustified the invasion was.