Dr Kay is not the useful idiot the anti-war party claims -

Hardly had Lord Hutton finished summarising his report than the goalposts were promptly moved. Among those who were apoplectic that he had exonerated the Government and eviscerated the BBC, the cry arose that he hadn't addressed the "wider" issue.

This was that the Iraq war was based on false intelligence that Saddam posed a threat with his weapons of mass destruction. This myth has been reinforced by widespread media reports that Dr David Kay, who recently resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, has said that no WMD actually existed in Iraq, thus proving that Saddam was no threat and we were led up the garden path to war.

If you look, however, at what Dr Kay actually said last week to the Senate Armed Services committee and in media interviews, a very different picture emerges. Certainly, he claimed there had been a major failure of intelligence which had misrepresented the situation. But he was specifically referring to large weapons stockpiles which he now thought were not there after all, and to the large-scale weapons programme which he said had been wound down after 1991.

Intelligence agencies, he said, had failed to grasp that in the corruption and chaos of the Iraqi regime, Saddam himself was being told lies about his weapons programmes, whose large-scale production had stalled under the pressure of UN inspections.

Such a serious intelligence failure is clearly a huge political embarrassment for both President Bush and Tony Blair, prompting even the US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to acknowledge that mistakes had been made and President Bush to say he wants to "know the facts".

But Dr Kay was not saying Saddam was therefore no threat on the WMD front. On the contrary, not only did he say it was possible that smaller WMD stockpiles remained hidden in Iraq, but that "right up to the end" the Iraqis were trying to produce the deadly poison ricin.

"They were mostly researching better methods for weaponisation," he said. Not only that, Saddam had restarted a rudimentary nuclear programme. And he had also maintained an active ballistic missile programme that was receiving significant foreign assistance until the start of the war.

Such revelations corresponded with Dr Kay's interim report last autumn, which detailed "dozens of WMD-related programme activities" which had been successfully concealed from Dr Hans Blix's UN inspectors.

These included a clandestine network of laboratories containing equipment suitable for chemical and biological weapons research, and new research on the biological agents Brucella and Congo Crimean Haemorrhagic Fever. Furthermore, a scientist who had hidden a phial of live Botulinum in his house had identified "a large cache of agents" that he had been asked, but had refused, to conceal and for which the ISG was now searching.

This all suggested, said Dr Kay, that after 1996 Saddam had focused on "smaller covert capabilities that could be activated quickly" to produce biological weapons agents. And last week he told this newspaper that he had discovered, from the interrogation of Iraqi scientists, that before the war Saddam had hidden WMD programme components in Syria.

So according to Dr Kay, Saddam had posed a very live threat indeed from WMD. Yet this evidence has been almost totally disregarded, as an nearly unanimous chorus of journalists has asserted that even Dr Kay said Iraq had no WMD.

Dr Kay's evidence has been brushed aside because of the assiduously promulgated myth that we only went to war because we were told that Iraq had WMD that were ready to use. But this is not so. We went to war because Saddam was grossly in breach of UN resolutions instructing him to prove he had dismantled his WMD programme.

True, Bush and Blair asserted that he had WMD stockpiles which would be found. But this was not the reason for war. Such claims were only made to bolster the case to a public that seemed incapable of grasping that the reason for war was not the presence of WMD but the absence of evidence that it had been removed.

Failure to make this case successfully led Bush and Blair to claim - according to Dr Kay, in good faith but on the basis of flawed intelligence - that since these stockpiles were unaccounted for they were probably still there. That claim has now spectacularly backfired, since the failure to discover any WMD has merely led people to conclude that this proves the war was indeed ill-founded. But this is not so.

For the fact that Saddam was actively engaged in WMD programmes, large-scale or not, shows he was indeed in breach of the UN resolutions, and was indeed the threat he had been assumed to be from his record, temperament, regional ambitions and links to terrorism.

How much ricin, after all, do you need to kill thousands of people? To listen to anti-war critics, it would seem that modest amounts of biological agent somehow don't count as WMD, or a re-started nuclear programme is no threat because it is only rudimentary.

To Dr Kay, the war was absolutely necessary because Saddam had become "even more dangerous" than had been realised, and, he said last week, "it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat". Yet virtually no one has reported these remarks. Instead, Dr Kay is being quoted out of context to sustain the charge of Government duplicity by the anti-war brigade.

They have implied that Dr Kay resigned because he realised no WMD ever existed. But actually, he threw down his bat and stormed off the pitch in fury at the Bush administration for failing to give the ISG the money it needed to search for WMD, and for its incompetence in not preventing crucial evidence being destroyed by Iraqi looters.

Those who know him well say he is so angry that he has been determined to embarrass the administration as much as possible. The result is that he has enabled the British media and anti-war politicians to take his finding that Saddam posed a different sort of threat, even deadlier than had been thought, and turn it instead into the false claim that he said no threat had existed at all.

History is constantly being rewritten over Iraq by people who were against the war from the start and have presented every development in the most malevolent light to prove that Bush and Blair took us to war on a lie. Logic, rationality and judgment have been suspended; and Dr Kay's testimony is but the latest casualty.

Another take...

"They have implied that Dr Kay resigned because he realised no WMD ever existed. But actually, he threw down his bat and stormed off the pitch in fury at the Bush administration for failing to give the ISG the money it needed to search for WMD, and for its incompetence in not preventing crucial evidence being destroyed by Iraqi looters.
"Those who know him well say he is so angry that he has been determined to embarrass the administration as much as possible. The result is that he has enabled the British media and anti-war politicians to take his finding that Saddam posed a different sort of threat, even deadlier than had been thought, and turn it instead into the false claim that he said no threat had existed at all."

"History is constantly being rewritten over Iraq by people who were against the war from the start...."

And how convenient that the "writers" of that constantly revised history are in the media.

Another example of an otherwise honorable but naive person putting himself in a position to be used by a very ruthless and determined opposition. Dr. Kay sounds a lot like Dr. Kelly. I hope he doesn’t meet the same end. Possibly our government can contract with Lord Hutton to conduct the independent inquiry everyone pretends to want.

Since he barely touched the surface of this search, had he been honorable he would have explained why he left and said only that he had filed his interim report and had little to add, that the final report by his succesor would be the place to look for conclusions.

*****

I watched his testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee (most of it twice) and he did say what you wrote above. The media do not choose to share that information with the general public. They have latched on to the "no WMD" soundbite like drowning men to a life buoy.

"Those who know him well say he is so angry that he has been determined to embarrass the administration as much as possible."

I've been wondering about the possibility of something like this. Kay has to know full well how the media will distort what he says, but he doesn't seem all that careful to ensure that they get the story right.

Is the socialist left now trying to use the term "useful idiot" as a pejoritive? Do ANY of them realize that it is a term the communists used for those in America who aided their goals?

The author of this editorial didn't actually use the term in the body or quoting anyone on the left so it could have been just the editor who wrote mistakenly the headline.

This wouldn't be the first time in this modern scenario that the left have tried to co-opt terms that cast a bad light on them. Americans have talked of America's sovereignty but some on the left have made the appeal that America invaded a sovereign nation. America isn't supposed to have sovereignty because we should bow to the EU-SSR and UN to get permission before we act. We are also admonished to change our laws and constitution to do what the UN and EU want (ban guns, same sex marriage...).

The proper use of words needs to be fought just as diligently as Klennex tries to protect their brand name from becoming just the name of a generic product.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.