"Thank Christ that I am not the one that has to make the decision when all your most experienced and trusted advisors are telling you that a threat exists and it requires urgent attention"
Odd that even at before the invasion there were some some in Downing Street who were sceptical.

What is one to make of the "Downing Street Memo" of July 23 2002. It was a summary of the latest meetings in Washington between the heads of British intelligence and their American counterparts, prepared for the eyes only of Blair and a few close colleagues.
"There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the memo states baldly. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

And there was Robin Cook: "I was taken aback at how thin the dossier was. There was a striking absence of any recent and alarming firm intelligence."
Cook's diaries are illuminating on the subject: On February 20 - before the invasion - Cook was given a briefing by Sir John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. "My conclusion at the end of an hour is that Saddam probably does not have weapons of mass destruction in the sense of weapons that could be used against large-scale civilian targets," he wrote.

On March 5, Cook saw Blair, noting afterwards: "The most revealing exchange came when we talked about Saddam's arsenal. I told him, 'It's clear from the private briefing I have had that Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction in a sense of weapons that could strike at strategic cities. But he probably does have several thousand battlefield chemical munitions. Do you never worry that he might use them against British troops?'"
Blair replied, "Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use."

The problem was, Blair knew that Bush had already decided to go to war and that the UN weapons inspectors were irrelevant. Cook writes: "Tony made no attempt to pretend that what Hans Blix might report would make any difference to the countdown to invasion."
He goes on: "The second troubling element to our conversation was that Tony did not try to argue me out of the view that Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use against city populations and capable of being delivered with reliability over long distances. I had now expressed that view to both the chairman of the JIC and to the prime minister and both had assented in it.
"At the time I did believe it likely that Saddam had retained a quantity of chemical munitions for tactical use on the battlefield. These did not pose 'a real and present danger to Britain' as they were not designed for use against city populations and by definition could threaten British personnel only if we were to deploy them on the battlefield within range of Iraqi artillery.
"I had now twice been told that even those chemical shells had been put beyond operational use in response to the pressure from intrusive inspections."
Cook sums up: "I have no reason to doubt that Tony Blair believed in September that Saddam really had weapons of mass destruction ready for firing within 45 minutes. What was clear from this conversation was that he did not believe it himself in March."

A former British Foreign Secretary - arguably better briefed than Terry, Dickey or Brucie - states his belief: "I am certain the real reason he went to war was that he found it easier to resist the public opinion of Britain than the request of the US President."

It may never be fully explained exactly why Blair pledged his support for Bush's plans to invade Iraq. However Lord Goldsmith had already told him that a war for the sake of regime change would be illegal. so the stated reason had to be that Iraq posed a "serious and current" threat to the UK. To that end, the intel was made to fit the plan on both sides of the Atlantic.
Many did see through that, but the two administrations used a supine media to ram the claims down the throats of the public at every opportunity to the point where they were largely believed by the man and woman in the street.

In his resignation speech, Cook posed a question to which I have yet to hear a convincing answer: "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term - namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British Government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for 20 years, and which we helped to create?"

It certainly wasn't 9/11 or Islamic terrorism that rendered military action urgent. It just might, however, have been the agenda of the pointy-heads at the PNAC.