Maybe the dog ate them

Ah, Dubya: the President Quayle we never had....

I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons.  But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons.  And when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went.  They could have been destroyed during the war.  Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq.  They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we’ll find out.  That's what the Iraqi survey group  let me  let me finish here.

But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons.  Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons.  Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons.  He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world.

--President George W. Bush, on NBC's Meet the Press, February 8, 2004

Right. While dodging cluster bombs and hiding in bunkers, with an unprecedented array of US military surveillance trained on them and the whole world watching on television, Saddam and his henchmen managd to secretly destroy or ship out their massive stores of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, and get rid of every shred of evidence that they still existed, that they hadn't all been destroyed as long ago as 1991.

Or maybe the tooth fairy came in the middle of the night and took them. Or the Easter Bunny--that no-good terrorist! See, we knew he was in cahoots with the Iraqis all along.

Or maybe, just maybe, the cautions from our own intelligence community that the evidence for such weapons was sketchy; the reports from defectors that the weapons had been destroyed over a decade ago; the UN inspectors' claims that they needed more time to do their job--maybe all those things that the Bush League uber-hawks chose to ignore in their rush to judgment--were things that we should have paid attention to in the first place.