And then, answering a question from Sen. John McCain, Kay reached the identical conclusion of his counterpart in Great Britain. Whatever we think of the honesty of our intelligence sources, they simply are not reliable enough. Either Saddam Hussein was spectacularly resourceful in setting up brummagem deposits of chemical and biological look-alikes, or the perceptions of our whole assembly of satellites and Peeping Toms and spies on the ground can be fatefully mistaken. If there is a scandal, it is that our vision, in important matters, is defective.
The intelligence services, in 1962, initially discounted reports that the Soviets had nuclear missiles on the ground in Cuba, but that is indeed what they proved to be, and photographs were taken and shown to President Kennedy. Our ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, then showed them to the Security Council, causing embarrassment to the Soviet members, to the extent that Soviet officials were capable of embarrassment.
The question will naturally arise: If we had had proof positive that the weapons did not exist on Iraqi soil, would we have held back the war?
Certainly Mr. Bush would have had fewer supporters in Congress for his Tonkin Gulf-style resolution, leaving it for him uniquely to decide whether to go on to war. The Democratic presidential candidates are resting their claims on this one point: that the president himself deceived the American people.
Whether the war that proceeded was indefensible asks a different question, not one that can be authoritatively answered pending the distillation of the scene in Iraq. If what comes out of the bloody present is a reformed society freed of a sadistic tyrant, bent on a future in which there is, so to speak, separation of church and state, and if such developments inspire a whole region in the direction of civic stability, you will not find presidential aspirants in the year 2008 declaiming about the misleading evidence on which we acted in 2003.