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

To date, US forces have uncovered scant evidence of an ongoing nuclear program in Iraq - unlike 12 years ago, when the world was shocked to discover how far Iraq had progressed in nuclear bomb design. Since the war it has also become clear that the usefulness of those tubes for nuclear work is a subject of much dispute - even within the US intelligence community. "Going down the list of administration ... distortions, one has to talk about first and foremost the nuclear threat being hyped," said Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence analyst, at an Arms Control Association briefing last week.

On chemical and biological weapons, prewar rhetoric was similarly blunt. On March 17 in his address to the nation, Mr. Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Officials talked of massive stockpiles of nerve gas, mustard gas, and anthrax. US, British, and Australian troops have now visited over 230 suspected biological or chemical sites and have found neither stockpiles nor production equipment. "They have not found any evidence of any prohibited activities at any of these sites," noted Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at the arms-control briefing.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, in his briefing to the United Nations, also talked about unmanned aerial vehicles that might have been intended for use as poison sprayers, and Scud missiles and warheads tipped with biological or chemical weapons being moved about Iraq.

"No sign of these missiles or warheads has been found," says Mr. Cirincione.

In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government published a dossier last year which charged that Hussein had chemical or biological weapons ready for deployment within 45 minutes of an order. That statement turned out to be based on a single intelligence source of doubtful reliability. "The claims made in the September dossier are unlikely to be dispelled unless more evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs comes to light," a cross-party Parliamentary committee recently concluded.

In their defense administration officials have been vehemently denying that they misled the public on purpose, while pointing out that their general thesis - that Hussein was a ruthless killer eager to obtain the worst weapons possible - was widely held in the West.

That's true, says an Australian intelligence analyst who resigned his post over what he felt was exaggerated prewar rhetoric. But officials never told the public about what a shadow-game intelligence analysis is, about how it is an informed guess, and the start, not the end, of policy debate. "We've seen that time and time again over many months in regard to Iraq," says Andrew Wilkie, a former senior analyst at the Australian Office of National Assessments.

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