BLAME GAME.(The Talk of the Town)(intelligence services and the Iraq War)

"We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here." Thus David A. Kay, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, publicly confirmed what had become increasingly obvious: the assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed arsenals of weapons of mass destruction posing an international threat were false. Kay, who has spent much of the last nine months in Baghdad heading the Iraq Survey Group, told Reuters, "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War. . . . A combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them." As for Iraq's nuclear program, which the American and British governments claimed could, under certain circumstances, produce a crude atomic bomb within a year, Kay said, "It really wasn't dormant, because there were a few little things going on, but it had not resumed in anything meaningful."

Kay's findings are all the more striking because he did not, and does not, oppose the war. We have often fought wars "on the right side for the wrong reason," he said last week. He coupled his mea culpa with a call for an independent investigation into the errors made by the intelligence agencies. Such an inquiry is certainly necessary. Last summer, the White House released a declassified version of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that represented the consensus of the intelligence community. Originally presented to the White House in October, 2002, it stated: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions"; "Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, GF (cyclosarin), and VX"; and "Baghdad has established a large-scale, redundant, and concealed BW agent"--biological weapons--"production capability."

American intelligence experts were not alone in their assessments. Analysts in the British, French, and German intelligence agencies believed that Saddam had at least some chemical and biological munitions. David Kelly, the late British weapons scientist, shared this view. During the nineteen-nineties, when he worked as a U.N. weapons inspector, he played a key role in forcing the Iraqi government to admit the existence of its biological-weapons program. After Kelly and his colleagues left Iraq, in 1998, he never doubted that Saddam was trying to hide something.

But what? It's a long leap from the fact that most experts believed Iraq had some unconventional weapons to the claim, which some defenders of George Bush and Tony Blair are adopting as a fallback position, that it was faulty intelligence, not faulty policy, which led us to our current predicament in Iraq. (Bill O'Reilly, of the Fox News Channel, has called on the President to admit that the C.I.A. sold him a bill of goods and to fire the agency's director, George Tenet, who, in case you've forgotten--O'Reilly hasn't--was a Democratic appointee.)

Kelly, who consulted for MI6, the British equivalent of the C.I.A., and for the British Defence Intelligence Staff, was in a position to observe what was really happening inside the intelligence agencies. In May of last year, he talked to Andrew Gilligan, a BBC journalist, who put together a piece claiming that Downing Street had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier ...