The CIA is reviewing its intelligence, British agents are reportedly doubting their own assessments and Saddam Hussein's enemies are being accused of manufacturing evidence as the White House pulls words like "bureaucracy" out of its rhetorical hat to explain why it could have lied to the world rather than drawing appropriate conclusions from the evidence at hand.
Now, senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic want answers to what is becoming the most asked question since major combat ended in Iraq: Where are the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons the US-led coalition said it went to war to destroy?
US President George W. Bush said this weekend that weapons had already been found. As evidence, though, he pointed to two suspected biological laboratories which both the Pentagon and American weapons hunters have said do not constitute arms.
For a war fought without the backing of the international community, evidence of the weapons Iraq claimed it no longer had would bolster US credibility around the world.
Now that 11 weeks have passed without such proof, international pressure is mounting on Bush and his coalition partners. The Pentagon is sending a new group of weapons hunters to Iraq to expand the search beginning on Monday.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who visited Iraq this week, said Saturday there is "no doubt whatever that the evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction will be there. Absolutely."
"I certainly do know some of the stuff that has been already accumulated as the result of interviews, and others which is not yet public -- but what we are going to do is assemble that evidence and present it properly to people," Blair told Sky News television.
Speaking during a visit to the Russian city of St. Petersburg, Blair said there were "literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of potential WMD sites that are still being investigated. We have only just begun that task."
But Clare Short, who quit Blair's Cabinet on May 12 to protest the government's Iraq policy, was quoted as saying she had seen British intelligence reports on Iraq and they did not support the claim.
"The suggestion that there was a risk of chemical and biological weapons being weaponized and threatening us in a short time was spin," Short was quoted as saying by The Sunday Telegraph newspaper. "That didn't come from the security sources."
But even as Blair and Bush express confidence, members of Bush's Cabinet are offering up alternative theories that have drawn deep concerns both at home and abroad.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld speculated this week that the weapons were destroyed on the eve of fighting. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, said in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine that weapons of mass destruction became a war banner because it was the only reason everyone in the administration could agree upon when citing why they were going after Saddam.
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.
The comments caused a stir in Europe, where lawmakers from such coalition countries as Britain and Denmark demanded their governments open inquiries into the matter. At home, members of Congress are also questioning the war motives.
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