01:00 AM EDT on Friday, October 8, 2004

The report from U.S. weapons inspectors this week that they could find no signs that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when invaded by U.S. and coalition partners in March 2003 is no surprise.

President Bush has pretty much admitted that, and the administration is coming out with a report on the lapses that led to faulty estimates. The nation needs to hear the administration explain as fully and frankly as possible how its interpretations of intelligence information led it to erroneously assert with such force just before the invasion that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD then.

Did high officials, especially the president, ask tough enough questions about the intelligence? Were they too swayed by ideology to coolly evaluate the available facts? Did they knowingly exaggerate estimates of Iraqi WMD capabilities? Did they make too many decisions not founded on information from spies on the ground in Iraq?

The report also said that Saddam Hussein had been planning to put together his WMD programs once U.N. sanctions were removed, and had been hiding long-range missile programs and WMD laboratories from U.N. inspectors.

Actually, sanctions were already crumbling, because Saddam was bribing public officials and business people in various countries (especially France, China and Russia), as well as people in the United Nations -- which increasingly seems as much a festival of economic corruption as of hypocrisy. The U.N. "food-for-oil" program was an extraordinarily corrupt enterprise, which Saddam was manipulating, to, among other things, get back to making and stockpiling WMD. Not coincidentally, Security Council members France, China and Russia -- Saddam's major bribees in his partly successful efforts to get around the sanctions -- voted against U.S.-led efforts to get the United Nations to sign off on an invasion to enforce U.N. resolutions.

Saddam had long been violating U.N. resolutions and sanctions, because he didn't believe that the United Nations was serious about enforcing them. It wasn't, in part because he had paid off some key members.

Given that Saddam had enthusiastically used WMD before the Iraq war and often refused to tell U.N. inspectors where missing weapons were, the whole world believed that he still had them. We know now that many were destroyed before the war. Others are missing. Who knows where. The report leaves clear that Saddam was a grave threat, but not the immediate peril that virtually everyone thought he was at the outbreak of the war. We need to know in much more detail how and why the Bush administration and much of the rest of the world misjudged the situation.