In the never-ending round robin of "who lied to whom?" we have this entry:

Saddam himself did not know he lacked weapons of mass destruction. [His regieme] functioned like an unstaffed mental asylum.
...
Copious hypothetical plans were drawn up, and again and again the Kay teams found the paper equivalent of a "smoking gun", only to be unable to pair it with real-life evidence. That was because Saddam's weapons programmes -- except for some progress in illicit missile-making -- existed only on paper.

Not that it'll make much difference to the sword-bearers on the other side of this particular holy war.

Personally, I take heart at revelations like these. It took six years before Americans knew the Gulf of Tonkin incident was essentially a fabrication (and one far flimsier than this). By that time more than fifty thousand soldiers had lost their lives.

Politicians lie. Beauracrats lie. Governments lie. It's what they do. You judge the health of a system by how quickly the lies are caught.