[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
Many governments believed that Saddam possessed or was developing WMD's.

[/ QUOTE ]
I doubt that a single government, including those of the U.S., the UK or Israel, believed on the eve of invasion that Iraq posed any WMD threat to anyone. There were probably assumptions that if one looked hard enough, some quantity of mustard gas or growth medium might be found, but no government believed that these were threatening WMD, that Saddam was capable of using against any other country or even "his own people," or had the slightest inclination to risk suicide by surrendering them to terrorists. I'm not aware of any intelligence assessment by any country that Iraq possessed WMD after the inspectors were given unrestricted access to the sites the U.S. claimed were harboring them. These claims of near consensus by the international community are whole-cloth lies that receive wide circulation because they widen responsibility and support the official line that the WMD debacle was just screw-up, a well intentioned mistake.

In fact, I suspect that virtually everyone in Congress (including staffers) and all Washington journalists had the same impression, something that Anthony Zinni pointed out on 60 minutes recently. You can see this in the perceptible shift in media coverage from (1) reporting specific administration claims to (2) reporting generalized assumptions about WMD as the specifics were being undermined, to (3) reporting that Bush is really a human rights crusader with a "messianic vision" to build nations and democratize the world, the importance of WMD claims declining as their credibility evaporated.

There's a lot of evidence for this that I've detailed before and won't reiterate. This includes the creation of the White House Office of Special Plans in August 2002 to bypass normal intelligence channels and conduct "media strategy," which included outlandish claims by Doug Feith that received wide circulation in the right-wing press (without mention of their debunking by the CIA, FBI and other administration sources via Congressional testimony and correspondence). It also includes the creation of a similar group in Sharon's office to bypass Mossad, which coordinated its efforts with Feith, and the allegation of Blair's own foreign secretary that Blair privately admitted weeks before the invasion that Iraq probably didn't have any WMD, or the Hutton report's generous conclusion that Blair thought the problem was more "latent" than imminent, contrary to his public scaremongering.

The claim about "many" governments believing in Iraqi WMD probably originated with statements like: "every Western intelligence agency with a presence in the Middle East" (tacitly limiting this to the U.S., the UK and Israel) believed that Saddam had WMD. The phrase then got shortened to "every" country and agency, or "most" or "many" of them. It's all made-up.

Take Israel, for example, whose leaders produced an endless stream of Saddam horror scenarios. "[A] study produced by Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies indicates that Israel's vaunted intelligence services could find no indication that Iraq possessed banned weapons, despite their location and access to Middle East sources. 'On the eve of war,' said the report, 'Israeli intelligence on Iraqi capabilities resembled its counterparts in the United States and other Western countries. It had not received any information regarding weapons of mass destruction and surface-to-surface missiles for nearly eight years." J. Bamford, "A Pretext for War," p. 309.

Another source for these claims are foreign intelligence that the providing country didn't take seriously, like the forged Niger documents we got from Italy or the "curveball" disclosures from Germany.