If you can stand it, there has been some good stuff written on the Kay/Hutton/WMD issue in recent days, and it's worth looking at. The Telegraph's Melanie Phillips gets into the selective reporting of David Kay's remarks by antiwar folks, but suggests that he did have an anti-Bush agenda upon resigning, but not for the reasons you might assume:
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.
Laurie Mylroie wonders how Kay is assigned more credibility after six months in Iraq with a team that had few weapons experts, than UNSCOM is given after many years of experience in Iraq.
As usual, Christopher Hitchens speaks plainly, and makes sense:
"...if he really didn't have any stores of unlawful WMD, it was very dumb of him to act as if he still did or perhaps even to believe that he still did. And it seems perfectly idiotic of anybody to complain that we have now found this out (always assuming that we have, and that there's no more disclosure to come). This highly pertinent and useful discovery could only be made by way of regime change. And the knowledge that Iraq can be finally and fully certified as disarmed, and that it won't be able to rearm under a Caligula regime, is surely a piece of knowledge worth having in its own right and for its own sake."
And David Warren seems to buy into the "Saddam had no WMD's and even he didn't know it" theory. I am not yet nearly ready to make that leap, based on anything that David Kay is saying or not saying.
UPDATE 2/5: Glenn Reynolds links to this link-filled post that summarizes a lot of the WMD facts and developments.
Posted by dan at February 5, 2004 11:02 AM