DougR,

Your logical fallacy is pretending you know what "would have" happened.

The Neocons have wanted to oust Saddam and take over Iraq for years, and Bush used 9/11 as an opportunity. I strongly suspect we'd have gone in anyway, no matter what Saddam's attitudes to the inspectors had been. The claim that Saddam had large stockpiles of WMD was never supported by the UN inspectors anyway, so their reports were essentially irrelevant. They just had some convenient numbers of "unaccounted for" weapons that became grist for the Bushmills.