The Germans certainly - the intelligence service believed that there were WMD. It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I still believe to some degree that Iraq had WMD.
I'm saying that the WMD reporting was not consciously evil. It was bad journalism, even very bad journalism.
The 'Axis of Evil' was - and is - very real, as the tyrants of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea knew full well.
Americans were told repeatedly by President Bush and Vice President Cheney that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found.
I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war - certainly, the French president, Jacques Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq's possession of WMD.
It's all well and good to say that Germans were all responsible for the concentration camps, but I don't think they were. I think that was the work of a small group of fiends.
Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.
The intelligence failures with respect to Iraq were massive and have damaged our credibility around the world.
At this time I had complete confidence in Russian policy and believed that the Western Allies deliberately allowed Germany and Russia to fight each other to death.
Every intelligence agency in the world believed that Saddam Hussein had had weapons of mass destruction, precursor chemicals. The inspectors, over a period of ten years, had managed to gain access to much of those precursor chemicals.