story Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | New theory for Iraq's missing WMD: Saddam was fooled into thinking he had them

"The theory, which is doing the rounds in the upper reaches of Whitehall, is the result of an attempt to find what one official source called a 'logical reason' why no chemical and biological weapons had been found in Iraq.

According to the theory, Saddam and his senior advisers and commanders were told by lower-ranking Iraqi officers that his forces were equipped with usable chemical and biological weapons.

The officers did not want to tell their superiors that the weapons were either destroyed or no longer usable.

The trouble for Britain was, the theory goes, that MI6's informants were the senior officials close to Saddam - with the result that British intelligence was also hoodwinked.

The hypothesis, which is being spread privately by officials, is open to the interpretation that the government is searching for an excuse, however implausible, for failure to discover any WMD in Iraq. "

So here's the new theory: the UK and the US were fooled by false evidence presented to Hussein himself to convince him that he had WMDs. How convenient this is indeed:

-- US and UK no longer have to explain why they didn't find WMDs because there weren't any
-- The don't have to explain why they thought there were weapons because Hussein himself believed in them
-- At any rate, we don't need to belabor the point since the real reason to go to war was to liberate Iraq from Hussein, right? (No need to mention that the US put Hussein in there in the first place._