Britons and Americans wept copiously in mid-week. It appeared almost as if there had been collusion to save the reputations of Tony Blair and George Bush. Pressure has been building for months, to the effect that the British and American governments knew all along, during the heavy debates in the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, that Saddam Hussein had no inventory of weapons that might conceivably be held to be of mass destruction. Everyone was waiting for confirmation by two august sources. The first is Lord Hutton, one of those British solons whose word is accepted as Mosaic in authority and integrity.
What he said, after investigating British intelligence from the six-month period before the fighting began, is that there was no solid evidence that weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq. But he said that such evidence as there was might easily justify the suspicion that such weapons had existed. He rebuked sharply the proposition, advanced by the BBC, that intelligence estimates had been "sexed up" for the purpose of advancing the war-bound agenda of Tony Blair.
That was a bombshell. Criticizing the BBC at so fundamental a level is on the order of looking into the Bureau of Weights and Measures to find out whether a pound was being misweighed. The chairman of the board of governors of the BBC promptly resigned, leaving only a Tory former foreign secretary to complain that intelligence estimates should have been so mistaken.
Yes, they were mistaken, Lord Hutton's 740-page report agreed, but the same data yielded the same suspicions in France and Germany and, of course, the United States.
In Washington we had the testimony of the eloquent David Kay. He had been in charge of searching out the evanescing weapons and one day, a few weeks ago, after months of scrutiny, he came to a conclusion, namely that such weapons did not exist.
But like Lord Hutton, he declined to insinuate any deception by administration officials. Kay also noted that the same evidence had convinced French and German officials that the dangerous weapons were there. WMD, he said, is what it looked like, and that is what President Bush acted on.