I wonder: does anyone take the WMD stuff seriously? Maybe I am stuck in a ivory tower (not likely, out here in Liverpool NSW) but I haven't met anyone who doesn't realise the whole thing is a con. And that's counting pro-war folks, including my Kurdish taxi driver who told me how clever it was to use that pretext to wipe out Saddam. From this vantage point it doesn't even look like the Bushies themselves took it too seriously. Either that or a four year old is better at lying than George Bush.
Maybe if you really wanted to explain why it is that there is no WMD outrage, you'd have to ask why it is that people seem comfortable, or at least resigned, to being lied to.
Another point is that the WMD hype was the lie a lot of people hoped would turn out to be the truth, and now that it has turned out to be false, it has become the lie that can expiate us. A lot of people hoped that WMDs would be found, so the war would be justified. At the same time, these people - unless they are incredibly naive - knew perfectly well that the war was going ahead anyway and had zip to do with the weapons...
Also: The notion that we were deceived into a war, at least deceived unwillingly, is strikes me as horribly naive. It seems related to the idea that one day a really juicy nugget of b.s. will fall off the governnent wagon and people will just see how much crap we've been fed. But it doesn't happen that way. Scandals don't usually compound each other. One replaces another, not by resolution but by obsolescence. For example, here in Australia, some years ago, there was a very high degree of outrage over the rate at which Aborigines were being incarcerated, which surpasses blacks during Apartheid, and the huge death rate they suffered in jail. The problem was never solved, but leftwing attention sort of drifted, towards the stolen generations issue Grant, Bill and I were discussing before. That too just got displaced, by the concentration camps. And that by the war. And that by the Governor General, who turned out to be a raving mysogynist and had to resign amidst mounting sex scandals. But that's gone, replaced by the WMDs. Everything changes everything. A building blows up, there is no more past... so we must wait to be annihilated/redeemed by the next big thing. It's a kind of news cycle messiahnism.
Thiago