The Bush Administration knew all along that whatever WMDs Saddam had, they didn't constitute a threat.

How do I know this?  Simple: back on May 11, 2003, Barton Gellman reported on how our war plan dealt with prospective WMD sites when our advancing troops encountered them on their way to Baghdad:

McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions -- the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of things were gone."

Short and powerfully built, McPhee has spent his adult life as a combat officer. He calls his soldiers "bubbas" and worries about their mail. "It ain't good" that suspect sites are unprotected, he said, but he refused to criticize fighting units who left evidence unguarded.

"You've got two corps commanders being told, 'Get to Baghdad,' and, oh, by the way, 'When you run across sensitive sites, you have to secure them,' " he said. "Do you secure all those sites, or do you get to Baghdad? You've got limited force structure and you've got 20 missions."

A low point came when looters destroyed what was meant to be McPhee's headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The 101st Airborne Division had used the complex, a munitions factory called the Al Qadisiyah State Establishment, before rolling north to Mosul. When a reporter came calling, looking for Task Force 75, looters were busily stripping it clean. They later set it ablaze.

As I posted a few days later:

So the message that the commanders in the field clearly had was, unless you think you can do both, don't bother to secure the WMD sites. Wave at 'em as you go by, and hope the followup units get to anything important there before it gets stolen and sold in the bazaar.

And now that we've known for nearly two months that any WMDs at these sites were made off with, what now? Is our Fearless Leader warning us, "there were WMDs in Iraq, but we can't account for them, and they could be used against us at any time"? Nope, that rhetoric was for before the war.

Now, he's dancing on his big boat and chanting, "We won, we won!" And you know what? That makes sense only if he knew it was a lie from the beginning: that there were no WMDs, no terrorist threat from Iraq, no nothing.

Unless, of course, he thought they constituted a threat, but didn't give a damn that they were on the loose in the Middle East.  Which would be far scarier than merely lying.

And why didn't those corps commanders have the troops to both go for Baghdad and secure WMD sites?  Oh yeah - Rumsfeld cut the troop levels for the invasion, over and over again, as documented in the New Yorker back in the spring of 2003.  Guess he wasn't too worried about the WMDs either.