France... of course! It's so obvious. This thing had to be pinned on the French eventually, right? France dummied up fake intelligence in order to trick us and make us look silly. So we double-outsmarted them by believing it and going to war with Iraq! Take that, France.
They say that France's intelligence services used an Italian-born middle-man to circulate a mixture of genuine and bogus documents to "trap" the two leading proponents of war with Saddam into making unsupportable claims. They have passed to The Sunday Telegraph a photograph which they claim shows the Italian go-between, sometimes known as "Giacomo" - who cannot be identified for legal reasons - meeting a senior French intelligence officer based in Brussels. "The French hoped that the bulk of the documents would be exposed as false, since many of them obviously were," an Italian official said.
"Their aim was to make the allies look ridiculous in order to undermine their case for war." According to an account given to The Sunday Telegraph, France was driven by "a cold desire to protect their privileged, dominant trading relationship with Saddam, which in the case of war would have been at risk".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/05/wuran05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/05/ixworld.html