The memory's not what it used to be but here are some of the excuses that Blair/Bush have come up with to explain their inability to find WMD in Iraq:

> Saddam destroyed them just before the war (the fiend).
> He moved them to Syria (the cheat).
> Iraqi generals destroyed the WMD but were too scared to tell Saddam (the cowards).
> Iraqi POWs won't tell us where they are (the spoilsports).
> Iraq's a big country you know.

None of these spins has held any more water than a particularly leaky sieve so a new excuse is needed. The latest excuse from Washington and London is that the spies got it wrong. Inquiries have been ordered in both capitals to discover how their intelligence agencies got it so badly wrong about Iraq's WMD threat. At last, the perfect excuse - don't blame us, blame the spooks. Best of all, these inquiries will go on for months (until after the election in Bush's case). Brilliant! Loads of time to think of another excuse!

But did the spies actually get it wrong as Bush and Blair now claim? This is a complex question since there were any number of strands of thought within the various intelligence agencies before the war. Nevertheless one can speak of one general trend. In both the US and Britain politicians pushed their spies to turn theories into certainties. The decision to invade Iraq had already been taken but the politicians needed "intelligence" about WMD to justify their belligerence. Because pre-war Iraq was such a closed society, it is hardly surprising that the best that Western spies could come up with were educated guesses about Saddam's WMD capability.

But this is not what the western public saw. No, they saw certitude instead of conjecture, most famously in Blair's "dodgy dossier" and Bush's Niger claim. Documents look very different once all the "may's", "might's", "could's" and "possibly's" have been removed. If the British and American people had seen the hesitancy of the real intelligence they may well have not been scared into supporting the war.

This is the real issue, the calculated manipulation of intelligence to justify an unprovoked attack. Of course, I can't prove this but out there, someone can. Is there a 21st century Daniel Ellsberg ready to expose these liars for what they are?