Should they have known better? Well, yes and no.

Two months after the United States seized control of Iraq, it appears that the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was far less dire than portrayed in White House prewar estimates.

President Bush's now-retracted assertion that Saddam Hussein's regime had tried to buy African uranium for its nuclear program is just one of the claims that in hindsight appear dodgy, or exaggerated.

Among other allegations for which no evidence has been found are that Iraq had an active, ongoing production line of chemical and biological weapons; that the Hussein regime retained 20 ballistic missiles capable of reaching as far as Cyprus; and that Iraqi forces had some chemical and biological weapons that could be deployed within 45 minutes.

It's important to remember that prior to the war many analysts around the world believed that Iraq had bad proliferation intentions. Evidence unearthed after the 1991 Gulf War proved as much.

The mistake of the Bush administration and its ally Britain may have been in shearing off the "perhaps" and "maybe" qualifiers from their statements, and in misrepresenting the certainty of the inherently ambiguous practice of intelligence analysis. "One key lesson of the Iraq war is ... that it is dangerous to over-politicize intelligence and to not provide a picture of the threat and reasons for warfighting that is not qualified to some extent," concludes a recent analysis by Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here.

As US forces continue to conduct a sweep of suspected WMD sites and search for key personnel thought to be involved in Mr. Hussein's weapons programs, more evidence is likely to surface. For that reason it is today virtually impossible to judge any of the administration's prewar statements completely wrong, or completely right, analysts say.

Take the retracted assertion of Hussein's attempt to buy uranium in Africa. The White House has said it now believes the intelligence behind this is false. But the British government - where the statement originated - continues to claim that it is true, saying there are other bits of intelligence on the matter to which the US is not privy.

That being said, the nuclear area in particular is one where rhetoric ran high before the war. Vice President Dick Cheney said at one point that Hussein "is absolutely devoted to nuclear weapons."

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said that aluminum tubes purchased by the Hussein regime "could only really be used for centrifuges" to enrich fissile material for weapons.

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