There has been a lot of focus lately on whether the American people were misled about the "real reasons" for invading Iraq. Another issue, which is potentially just is important, is being overlooked: the massive intelligence failure which led nearly everyone to believe that Iraq actually had WMD.

I was very uncomfortable with the way the administration entered the war in Iraq this year. It felt like the Bush administration had already decided to invade Iraq, and it didn't really matter what anyone else thought or did. As a result, we squandered goodwill and opportunities to gain allies.

But, be that as it may, we invaded Iraq, we're stuck there (for better or for worse), and many people have died on both sides of the conflict. The given reason was that Iraq posed a direct and immediate threat to the United States because of its WMD.

Even if you were skeptical about the "direct and immediate threat" (as I was--Saddam would have had to have been a complete moron to do anything even remotely hostile with hundreds of thousands of US troops on his border), everyone agreed on one thing. Iraq had stockpiles of WMD, and wasn't coming clean.

Except that it now appears there are no WMD . Even people who doubted Iraq's nuclear program still believed it had a chemical and biological program. Clearly Iraq wanted them, and had them in the past, but nobody can find them now. Maybe Saddam got scared and destroyed what he had before the inspectors came, maybe he'd been bluffing for years.

Whatever the reason, there was a massive failure on the part of all the world's intelligence communities, one which may have led us into a a war which otherwise wouldn't have happened.

If the Iraqi war was a consequence of this intelligence failure, then this failure was more costly both in lives lost (counting Iraqi dead--who are just as human as Americans) and dollars than the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

Don't get me wrong: there's no question that we need to finish the job we started in Iraq, and it is quite likely that Iraq will ultimately be a better place for what we did.

But if we're going to do something as expensive and drastic as invade another country, we should at least be confident that we know why we're doing it, and that the information we're relying on is correct.