This is a long email, but worth it:
Interesting post on the Butler report and the British case for war in Iraq. You miss, however, the critical phrase in Lord Butler’s quote. You cite Butler as saying: all competent intelligence communities "sincerely believed" that Saddam both "possessed and was bent on acquiring such weapons." Then comes the critical clause: everyone agreed, even "Hans Blix when he first took UN observers back into Iraq."
That is, of course the rub. Blix believed, until he did the research on the ground…and then he concluded that Saddam had no meaningful WMD capacity, in a series of reports delivered to the UN and available to every government and every intelligence agency (and the rest of us, too).
In other words, there was uncertainty; there was an internationally mandated program to reduce that uncertainty; that program did so; its results were consciously ignored, dismissed and ridiculed. Those who did so were wrong. They choose to believe and act on what they wished to be true, rather than on what the best available hard data told them.
You say that you think the truth lies between outright deception and the impossibility that leaders of such demonstrated honor as Bush and Blair could lie to their publics. Probably so: but it matters a great deal how close to one pole or the other of that dichotomy the answer falls. On the issue of WMDs, the answer is clear. Anyone who thought that Saddam’s WMDs presented a significant risk after reading, with care, Blix’s reports in early 2003 was not paying attention. I refer you especially to the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of this issue, which included a summary of the materials Blix declared unaccounted for, and the possible significance of those materials’ survival.
As Blix reported in February, 2003: "UNMOVIC is not infrequently asked how much more time it needs to complete its task in Iraq. The answer depends upon which task one has in mind – the elimination of weapons of mass destruction and related items and programs, which were prohibited in 1991 – the disarmament task – or the monitoring that no new proscribed activities occur. The latter task, though not often focused upon, is highly significant – and not controversial. It will require monitoring, which is "ongoing", that is, open-ended until the Council decides otherwise." In other words: with inspections in place, Saddam’s freedom of action would continue to be deeply impaired.
Given this, to argue for war after the first few weeks of 2003 on the basis of an existential threat from Iraqi WMDs (the "mushroom cloud over Manhattan" trope) required either flat rejection of the on the ground reports, or deceit about their meaning. My guess is that both tacks were taken by various members of the Bush administration, composed as it was of fantasists and cynics (and some who mixed both traits), and that the Blair team, more realist than their American counterparts, were the more purely deceitful.
The Dish 