Any attempt to come up with a rational response to the attacks on 9/11 did not immediately land one at the door of Saddam Hussein.  In his response to the attacks, President Bush articulated these main themes: that the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the regimes that harbored them; that the War on Terror was likely to be longer and more involved than other wars, and, as we weren't necessarily attacking nations per se, we would be looking for terrorists groups in up to sixty different countries; and, we would particularly focus on keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists.
          In attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan for their refusal to turn over Osama bin-Laden, the United States was making good on it's threat.  If the administration then wanted to follow through with the idea of making no distinction between terrorists and the regimes that harbored them, there were over a half-dozen countries other than Iraq that were more legitimate targets: Iran, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, and Indonesia.  Even Germany had known Islamic militants within their grasp (the main 9/11 al-Qaeda cell was originally based in Hamburg) but their own post WWII constitution forbade any intrusion into the religious practices of minorities.  Many of the countries listed here are our "strategic allies," which is a nice way of saying that we look the other way when it's they who are harboring terrorists, or when it's they who are repressing their own people, because they have something we need.  Between the Saudis, the Pakistanis, and the Egyptians, you have 95% of all the ingredients that went into the birth of Islamic radicalism.
          When I'm weeding in my garden, it doesn't do me any good to chop off the heads of the weeds, because they'll just be back next week.  You have to get down in the dirt and pull up the roots...pulling up the roots means identifying where they are.  What we did was go into Afghanistan and chop off some heads, and then instead of attacking the roots, we used whatever capital we might have had left in the court of world opinion to settle an old score with Saddam Hussein and attempt to secure the free flow of oil to the West for the foreseeable future.
          In the run-up to the second Gulf War, the majority of American people meekly accepted the obvious procession of Monty Python-esque fabrications foisted upon them by the administration, aided and abetted by their mouthpieces in the press.
          Here is Monty Python's "Dead Parrot Sketch."  What is a Monty Python comedy sketch doing in a book like this? I believe the "Shop Owner" is an almost perfect representation of the Bush administration in the run-up to Gulf War II.  The skit begins when a customer walks into a pet shop:

Mr. Praline:  I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique. Owner:  Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue...What's, uh...What's wrong with it?
Mr. Praline:  I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
Owner:  No, no, 'e's uh... he's resting.
Mr. Praline:  Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Owner:  No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!
Mr. Praline: The plumage don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Owner:  Nononono, no, no! 'E's resting!
Mr. Praline: All right then, if he's restin', I'll wake him up! (shouting at the cage) 'Ello, Mister Polly Parrot! I've got a lovely fresh cuttle fish for you if you show...
(Owner hits the cage)
Owner: There, he moved!
Mr. Praline: No, he didn't, that was you hitting the cage!
Owner: I never!!
Mr. Praline: Yes, you did!
Owner: I never, never did anything...
Mr. Praline: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) 'ELLO POLLY!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock alarm call! (Takes parrot out of the cage and thumps its head on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)
Mr. Praline: Now that's what I call a dead parrot.
Owner: No, no..... No, 'e's stunned!
Mr. Praline: STUNNED?!?
Owner: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin' up! Norwegian Blues stun easily, major.
Mr. Praline: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. That parrot is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein' tired and shagged out following a prolonged squawk.
Owner: Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords.
Mr. Praline: PININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that? Look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got 'im home?
Owner: The Norwegian Blue prefers keepin' on it's back! Remarkable bird, id'nit, squire? Lovely plumage!
Mr. Praline:  Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.
Owner: Well, o'course it was nailed there! If I hadn't nailed that bird down, it would have nuzzled up to those bars, bent 'em apart with its beak, and VOOM!
Mr. Praline: "VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!
Owner: No no! 'E's pining!
Mr. Praline: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!

          For those of us who grew up on this kind of humor, the parallels were sadly striking.  I believe that the Bush administration counted on the majority of Americans to still be so bent on revenge, so gung-ho, so jingoistic, that they could say almost anything that they wanted to, and then change that, and then do a 180 degree turn on that, and most people would fall in lockstep behind the flag and "National Security."  In sounding the moral imperative to rid the world of the evil Saddam, the Bush administration undermined their case by blatantly lying about their evidence.  Some are quick to point out that President Bush had the almost full support of Congress and "they saw the same intelligence that he did."  That is a false statement.  The handful of senior Senators and Congressmen to whom the White House was obligated to show intelligence were shown edited and incomplete versions of the whole picture.  The evidence was carefully sifted through, and only the things that supported the administration's view were presented.  Dissenting views were not allowed, or were sent back to be "corrected."  There have been numerous credible reports from several former administration members testifying to these facts.  It is now been corroborated, through the minutes of a British Cabinet meeting, the infamous "Downing Street Memos," what many people have known all along–that the American and British governments had decided to go to war with Iraq a long time ago and needed the intelligence to fit their case so that they could at least present the cover of legality.  Poor Colin Powell's performance at the UN in February of 2003 was one of the most dishonorable moments in diplomatic history–full of lies, speculations, half-truths, obfuscations, and misinformation.  He knew it, too, but being the loyal soldier, he took the bullet for the team.

* The report of Iraq buying uranium from Niger that President Bush used in his State of the Union address?  It was a hoax, a forgery.  A pretty clumsy one at that.  There were names of Niger leaders that weren't even in power on this "contract." (‘E’s uh,.. he's resting)
* The "proof" that Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda?  This would be through Ansar al-Islam, a small, 600-man Islamist group in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.  This charge was immediately dismissed by Ansar's leader, Mullah Krekar, a longtime, bitter foe of Saddam, and his "factory of chemicals and poisons" turned out to be a bakery.  The area in question was not even under Saddam's control, and this organization sought the overthrow of Saddam.
* The claim that Mohammed Atta, leader of the 9/11 hijackers, met with and Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague Czechoslovakia?  This claim was supposed to be more evidence that linked Saddam with al-Qaeda, but it was denied by both Czech, and eventually, US intelligence.  In an interview with the New York Times on January 9, 2004, Colin Powell said this about the linkage of Saddam and al-Qaeda: "I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection." (‘E's pinin' for the fjords)
* The "mobile biological weapons laboratories" central to the evidence?  They turned out to be food-testing trucks and hydrogen gas generators used to inflate weather balloons.  Powell himself admitted on April 2, 2004 that that information "appears not to have been that solid." (‘E's not dead-'e's stunned)
* In a September 7, 2002 press conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush referred to a report from the International Atomic Energy Commission, based on Hussein's nixing of inspections in 1998.  "I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied—finally denied—access, a report came out...that they were six months away from developing a weapon," the president said. "I don’t know what more evidence we need."  But the next day the commission claimed that no such document existed.  "There’s never been a report like that issued from this agency," Mark Gwozdecky, head of the group, told Reuters.  Asked why Bush referred to an apparently imaginary document, the White House claimed he was really talking about a report from 1991.  But Gwozdecky told Reuters no paper to that effect was issued by his agency in 1991, either.
* The British "secret spy dossier" entitled Iraq: It's Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation, depicted by the British government to be an up-to-date and unsettling assessment by British intelligence, and praised by General Powell as "a fine paper," was found to be lifted from magazines and academic journals, grammatical mistakes and all.
* Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons in Iraq, and self-described "card-carrying member of the Republican Party who voted for George W. Bush," believes that between 90% and 95% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed by the UN and the remainder were probably used or destroyed during "the ravages of Gulf War I." * The steel tubing that "proved" Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program? The Defense department "expert" analysts that made that claim didn't even bother to check with anyone in our Energy department or anyone at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility in Tennessee to see if these tubes were legit.  If they had, the scientists could have easily told them that they weren't the right size for nuclear reactors.  They were casings for 122-mm artillery.  
          By the way, President Bush gave job performance awards to these same analysts for the third year in a row for their excellent service to our country.  George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, on whose watch 9/11 happened and whose famous "slam dunk" line George Bush used as confirmation that Saddam had WMDs, was given the rare and highly prestigious Medal of Freedom, our nation's highest civilian honor.  Condoleezza Rice, the president's National Security Advisor, and the person most responsible for disseminating all of the various intelligence information and presenting it to the president, was rewarded with a promotion to Secretary of State.  As for Colin Powell, the only voice in the administration of moderation, he was "resigned" at the end of Dubya's first term.  It seemed to me that he had been sucking on a sour lemon for three years.
          Some of the statements that in the end proved to be most laughably false were unverified claims from Iraqi defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress headed by Ahmad Chalabi.  In a poll taken by Oxford Research International in Iraq in June 2004, Chalabi outpolled Saddam Hussein by a measure of three-to-one as the least trusted politician in Iraq.  A report by the Defense Intelligence Agency after the war started concluded that most of the information given by the Iraqi defectors "was of little or no value, with much of it invented or exaggerated." One of the most infamous was an Iraqi who defected to Germany code-named "Curveball."  Mr. Curveball proved to be a serial liar, but despite German Intelligence informing the Americans of their serious reservations about the veracity of this defector's information, the Bush Administration used Curveball's material in speech after speech.                 Where did the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi come from?  When I first heard about the INC, I assumed that it was much like the Polish government-in-exile in World War II.  The Poles were based in London and were awaiting an Allied victory so they could establish a new government in Free Poland.  That never happened because of a guy named Stalin, but that's another story.
          In this case, the Iraqi National Congress was virtually the creation of one man, John Rendon, head of a propaganda firm named the Rendon Group.  The Rendon Group was hired by the Pentagon to engage in what Rendon terms "perception management," or manipulating information.  Initially, though, Rendon was hired by the CIA to put together a credible opposition group to Saddam Hussein and find a suitable replacement as leader.  He organized a conference of Iraqi dissidents in Vienna, Austria, gave it a name, the Iraqi National Congress, and chose Ahmed Chalabi to head it.  Rendon was given over $300,000 a month to pass along to the INC to create a worldwide propaganda campaign against Saddam.
          After 9/11, the Rendon Group was given a contract by the Pentagon to plant false stories in the media and hide their origins.  It becomes easier to see how even a veteran reporter like Judith Miller of the New York Times could file a front-page article on December 20th, 2001, titled, "An Iraqi Defector Tells of Work On At Least 20 Hidden Weapons Sites," which was based on an interview that Ms. Miller did with a known liar who had failed a CIA polygraph test only days before.  The man was a 43-year-old Iraqi defector named Adnan Saeed al-Haideri, and he had been coached and prepped for the polygraph test and the subsequent interview by an INC member and former Rendon Group employee named Zaab Sethna.  Everything the man said in the article by Miller was false, but the damage had been done.

"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"  –Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair in May 2005.

           None of this information provides a moral reason why we shouldn't have gone to war with Iraq.  From a moral point of view, the facts remain that Saddam Hussein was a horrible man and his regime had tortured and murdered countless numbers of people.  He did, in fact, defy numerous U.N. resolutions, even if he was playing a deadly game of bluff.  So it would not be a stretch to make the case that at some point, being the largest and most powerful nation on earth, we might have a moral obligation to intervene on the Iraqi people's behalf.  There have been many credible arguments made from reasonable people that on a purely humanitarian level, this is the moral imperative of the world's largest liberal democracy.  Not that there haven't been numerous other circumstances around the world that, if you take that position, we should have also intervened, most notably in the genocide that happened in Rwanda, and now in the genocide happening in the Darfur region of Sudan.  The Bush administration only took the "saving the poor people of Iraq from the evil tyrant" position after all of this other hogwash was proven to be irrefutably false.  In the process, and maybe this was the grand master scheme, they've turned Iraq into a giant piece of flypaper for terrorists.

No matter what you thought of the reasons for going to war, didn't seeing the Iraqi people voting make it worth it? Didn't that make an impression on you?
          
          The same George W. Bush who declared during the 2000 campaign that his administration was not going to be into nation-building has settled on nation-building as the final resting place for his rationale for invading and conquering Iraq.  Of course, you'd have to be pretty cold-blooded if you didn't feel anything but admiration for the courage of the Iraqi people in braving all manner of violence just to go to the polls.  It was a great moment.  Unfortunately, it was a huge right turn that the United States made on its way to the War on Terror.  This is not what was advertised.  Would you want your son or daughter to be killed for this?  What part of America exactly were we protecting?  No, this has nothing to do with the War on Terror.  General Brent Scowcroft, former National Security Advisor to George Bush Sr., and no dove himself, said this, "This (war in Iraq) was said to be part of the war on terror, but Iraq feeds terrorism."  We now have over 150,000 troops in Iraq and only 17,000 in Afghanistan.  Are there, were there al-Qaeda members in Iraq?  Well, if it is to be believed that al-Qaeda has cells in over 60 countries, than the law of averages says that yes, there probably were at least some.  Keep in mind, though, that it is estimated that there are, or were, allegedly over 100 al-Qaeda members in the United States.
          The War on Terror should be about rooting out the terrorist infrastructures in Pakistan and stopping the seething hatred and unlimited billions of dollars spewing from Saudi Arabia.  Instead, we've spent over $600 BILLION dollars and counting in Iraq, much of it to fix what we broke.  Instead, we have brought Iraq to the brink of civil war.  Instead, we have traded the poor Iraqi people one hell for another.  What, or who, gave us the moral right to do this?  This Saddam Hussein, bad as he was, was not Adolph Hitler, and any attempt to play the Hitler card in this circumstance is an insult to anyone who knows the slightest bit about it.  We were not intervening, as we did in WWII, to save an entire hemisphere from being overrun.  He was not threatening to take over the world.  He couldn't even take over the no-fly zone in his own country!  From a completely different point of view, the Iraq of Saddam Hussein was a secular, yet Sunni-led country, providing a strategic counterweight to Shiite Iran.  Now that we've intervened, Iraq is a Shiite-led (hopefully moderate) Islamist country, with much closer ties to Iran.  This is good?
             This "insurgency" is as much about the Shia-Sunni divide as it is about anything else.  The fact that the US is there fighting on the Shia's side is what makes this mess an "insurgency."  The vast majority of Arab Muslims are Sunnis, with the rather large exception of Iran.  Although Iraq is a Shia-majority country, as stated earlier, Sunnis governed it.  Before we intervened, though, Iran was surrounded by Sunni countries–Afghanistan (and Pakistan, for all practical purposes), Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Turkmenistan.  Keep in mind that the Sunni Wahhabists think of the Shi'ites as kafir, or infidels.  Now there is a Shi'ite block that extends from one end of Iraq to the other end of Iran, which is upsetting the religious balance in the region, to say the least.  
          Keep in mind, as well, that the Bush administration had no plausible exit strategy because in their hubris, they thought they wouldn't need one.  In an almost unbelievable misreading of the tea leaves, and swallowing the information that the Iraqis exiles in London were feeding them (they were savvy enough to tell the administration what they wanted to hear, unlike some intelligence officers), the Americans thought they would be greeted as liberators, with flowers and cheers from a grateful Iraqi public.  Instead, the Iraqis saw them as the invaders who had starved them for over ten years, and now were further destroying their infrastructure.  Just because the Iraqi people may have loathed Saddam Hussein and would like to have seen him gone, it does not necessarily follow that they wanted the United States to do the job.  This is something that I think a lot of people don't understand. "When we want your help, we'll ask for it."  The latest reputable poll from Iraq states that 80% of Iraqis want the US to leave, and 45% think it's justified to kill Americans.

What about the Surge? You're not going to tear that down, too, are you?

          In January 2007, over three-and-a-half years after President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the President finally gave in to the reality on the ground and ordered 20,000 more troops to Iraq.  Prodded on by his more realistic Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and his visionary new commander of US troops in Iraq, General David Patraeus, the President's new strategy, dubbed "the Surge," was born.  Gates realized what many American generals had been saying all along: there weren't enough troops in the field to provide even a minimum amount of security to the Iraqi people given the terrible sectarian violence.  General Patraeus wrote the Army's manual on counter-insurgency, and was finally given a chance to put his strategy to use.  In reducing the level of violence in Iraq from catastrophic to merely bad, the Surge has to be seen as a tactical and strategic success.
          But any assessment of the Surge must also take into account several factors.  One is that the most dangerous areas of Baghdad were already in the process of being ethnically cleansed and walled off from each other, creating mini West Bank-like cantons.  Another factor is exhaustion and/or attrition.  The young males on both sides of the Sunni/Shia divide have mostly been killed, wounded, driven into exile or bribed into submission.  The Sunnis in Anbar province, many of whom are the same Baathists that we were there to overthrow, have been convinced both by the indiscriminate violence of al-Qaeda in Iraq and by tens of millions of American dollars to switch sides and fight against the foreign terrorists.  Finally, Muqtada al Sadr's large and well-armed militia has gone into a cocoon, and the Shia leader appears to be willing to keep his powder dry and wait the Americans out.
          Conservatives who renounced those against the war from the beginning as being unpatriotic traitors now point to the Surge as confirmation that they were right all along.  When faced with overwhelming evidence that the war, the idea of the war, and almost everything connected to the war has been a catastrophic failure for the United States, its people, and its reputation around the world, these same right-wingers resort to Mark McGwire-like tactics during the steroid hearings on Capitol Hill and "don't want to talk about the past," as if it is so far back in the mists of time that it is now irrelevant.  They then make the leap that because the Surge has met with tactical success, it somehow absolves them of the terrible judgment of supporting the war in the first place.  Who didn't think that if we poured enough American troops into Iraq that we would eventually pacify the insurgency? Raise your hand if that is what you thought we sent our young men and women into Harm's Way to die for.  In my opinion, spouting off now about the effectiveness of the Surge is like wildly celebrating the scoring of a touchdown when your team is losing the football game 42-7.
          The reason it absolutely is important to keep remembering the origins of this war (and right-wingers would love us all to forget it and just keep thinking about the Surge) is that we as a nation were lied to in the most despicable way by the leaders of our government, with the generous help of a sycophantic and compliant mainstream media.  This is the same media that gets constantly mislabeled as liberal.  The truly liberal media, including such publications as The Nation, or the website Common Dreams, were against the war from the beginning and saw the lies and manipulation of the American people for the crime that it was.
          After the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, many Americans optimistically thought that it would not be possible for our government to lie to the American people so blatantly and get away with it, not with mainstream investigative journalism at the height of its power.  With the consolidation of the mainstream media into the hands of just a few large conglomerates who all crave a seat next to those in power, the field of critical investigative journalism has been left to the so-called "fringe" media.  These reports are then dismissed and marginalized because they are seen as coming from the fringe.
          Among the many ways that the war in Iraq must be considered a failure is that President Bush completely lost his ability and power to influence events, here in the United States, but especially on the world stage.  He was rendered irrelevant.  No one believed a word he or his Cabinet said about anything.  No one took anything he said about freedom and democracy at face value anymore.  In the face of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, the President of the United States was a pitiful bystander, unable to lead the American people through it because his approval ratings were at historic, all-time lows.
          Because we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and committed so much blood and treasure to the tragic folly in Iraq, the Taliban and al Qaeda have been able to reconstitute themselves into a force more dangerous and deadly than at any time since 2001.

          "Saddam Hussein is a terrible person, he is a threat to his own people. I think his people would be better off with a different leader, but there is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam Hussein got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting in the wings to hold popular elections. (Laughter) You're going to get–guess what–probably another Saddam Hussein.  It will take a little while for them to paint the pictures all over the walls again–(laughter)–but there should be no illusions about the nature of that country or its society.  And the American people and all of the people who second-guess us now would have been outraged if we had gone on to Baghdad and we found ourselves in Baghdad with American soldiers patrolling the streets two years later still looking for Jefferson. (Laughter)"
           –Colin Powell, during a press briefing, in 1992.

Here are four true statements:

* Hummers aren't gas-guzzlers when compared to F-16 fighter jets.
* The Washington Nationals are a great baseball team when they are playing against The Holy Sisters of the Poor.
* I shot a 69 one time over nine holes of golf.
* Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law, who was definitely in a position to know, told interrogators that Iraq did indeed have WMD's, but that they were either destroyed during the 1st Gulf War, or they were subsequently destroyed by UN weapons inspectors.
Here are the four statements again applying our government's "selective use" of information:
* Hummers aren't gas-guzzlers.
* The Washington Nationals are a great baseball team.
* I shot a 69 one time.
* Saddam Hussein's brother-in-law, who was definitely in a position to know, told interrogators that Iraq did indeed have WMD's.



"If Iraq does acquire WMD's, their weapons will be unusable, because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration"
           –Professor Condoleezza Rice, writing in Foreign Affairs Magazine in 1999.    

          If I were captain of one of the sides in a War to End All Wars, the Mother of All Wars, the Israeli Armed Forces would be my 1st pick.  They have, pound for pound, the best military in the world.  It is a badly kept secret that Israel's arsenal contains at least two hundred nuclear weapons.  They have been in a state of perpetual high alert for fifty-seven years.  Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, is also viewed as one of, if not THE world's best spying organizations.  Israel has already demonstrated the will, and the ability to unilaterally meet threats that compromise its sovereignty or threaten its people.  In July of 1976, Israeli Special Forces slipped into Uganda and stormed a hijacked Air France airliner, rescuing virtually all of the Jewish and Israeli hostages taken by Palestinian terrorists.  In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osiraq, completely destroying the reactor, which was one month away from being fueled.
          If any nation should have felt threatened by Iraq from the mid-nineties to the weeks and months after 9/11, it would have been Israel.  Israel stood by during the first Gulf War like a Doberman chained to a fence while the kitten Hussein mockingly lobbed Scud missiles overhead.  If Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction left, the country most likely to feel the sting of them would have been Israel.  If Israel, with arguably the world's best intelligence agency, didn't feel threatened enough to take action or at least threaten to take action, doesn't that tell us something?
Maybe Israel was afraid of igniting a wider conflict.
Everything in Israel's past and its character tells us that Israel would take preemptive action if they feel directly threatened.  Saddam Hussein was a classic bully/coward who didn't want his neighbors to think he didn't have WMDs, lest he be thought of as weak.  But the UN weapons inspectors knew better, and so did the Israelis.
Why didn't they share that information with the US, their strongest ally in the world?
If the US wanted to take down Saddam, the Israelis weren't going to spoil it with something silly like the truth.  Besides, the UN inspectors did tell the US government and the world that Iraq did not possess WMDs, and the Bush administration didn't want to believe them.
          The fact of the matter is, Israel had the most to lose, being so geographically close to Iraq; it has an excellent intelligence agency in the Mossad, and it has never been afraid to take care of business unilaterally when it feels that its sovereignty (or in the case of WMDs, its very existence) is threatened.  I think in this case, Israel's silence speaks volumes.