He’s still around. He continues to support his claims though he is, to some degree, backpedaling. Oddly his change of heart has less to do with the need to overthrow Saddam (which Pollack considered an inevitable necessity) than with the timing. His thoughts on WMDs, however, should be kept in mind by the Bush Administration’s critics. In a interview with The Atlantic Monthly (Dec. 30, 2003), Pollack made clear that Bush is not the only one who believed that Iraq had WMDs:

[The Atlantic] You too were a believer in the idea that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. How did that happen and on what evidence did you come to that conclusion?

My evidence came straight from the intelligence community. …I was certainly not alone in this—this was a consensus among the U.S. government, it was a consensus among the UN inspectors, it was a consensus of American experts outside the U.S. government. In fact, it was a consensus in the entire international community.

It's important to remember that any intelligence service or country with the ability to monitor Iraq and its weapons programs—Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Israel—was a hundred percent certain that Saddam had these programs. There may have been some debate over just how aggressive they were or how far along they were. The Germans were the most alarmist of all on the subject of a nuclear weapon. They thought the Iraqis might have one in as little as two or three years. Our own intelligence community tended to be a little more conservative; they thought it was more like four to six years away—or five to seven. But no one doubted that Saddam had these weapons.

...

So there would have been very few, if any, people, who ever posited, even as a hypothetical, that Iraq didn't have any imminent WMD programs?

I can't think of anyone who did not believe that the Iraqis had a weapons of mass destruction program. There was simply no one.

Perception, however, becomes reality. As P.T. Barnum said, 'There’s a sucker born every minute" and the 'Bush lied about WMDs" meme has spawned enough rubes to fill the tents of a three ring circus. But the next time someone spouts such nonsense ask them to point out who believed, prior to the invasion, that Iraq didn’t have those weapons.

Whether Pollack is correct in his assesment that the war could have been put off a few more years is debatable. One thing, however, remains certain. An invasion of the country and overthrow of Saddam was inevitable, a matter of 'when' rather than 'if." The case for war could have been made without Pollack’s book but there would have been fewer 'chickenhawks" along for the ride. Now that these same people are becoming less hawk and more chicken they need to answer for why they haven’t turned on the author who helped launch the war.