BUTLER REPORT/Analysis: Vindication or whitewash? Frank Millar in London examines the Butler report and Tony Blair's response to it
So, no silver bullet then. In London the only political casualties of the Iraq war remain the former chairman and director general of the BBC, and Robin Cook, who quit the cabinet before the invasion, disavowing Tony Blair's claim that Saddam Hussein posed a real and current threat to Britain's national interests.
"Not so much what the Butler saw as what he wouldn't tell the rest of us," suggested former Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond, reflecting the dismay of the anti-war party at what they will certainly consider another "whitewash".
And there is much in Lord Butler's report that will fuel their belief that Mr Blair stretched the intelligence to produce the controversial Iraqi weapons dossier in support of a war he and President Bush had decided was going to occur in any event.
At the point of allied decision, Butler says, "there was no recent intelligence that would itself have given rise to a conclusion that Iraq was of more immediate concern than the activities of some other countries". Much of the intelligence was seriously flawed, and he and his inquiry team detected "a tendency for assessments to be coloured by over-reaction to previous errors". As a result, "there was a risk of over-cautious or worst-case estimates, shorn of their caveats, becoming the 'prevailing wisdom'."
The Blair government wanted an unclassified document on which to draw in its advocacy of its policy. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) took responsibility for the dossier and did its utmost to maintain its standard in offering a dispassionate assessment of intelligence on Iraqi nuclear, biological, chemical and ballistic missile programmes.
"But this will have put a strain on them . . . and in translating material from JIC assessments into the dossier, warnings were lost about the limited intelligence base on which some aspects of these assessments were being made. Language in the dossier may have left readers with the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgments than was the case."
Having reviewed all the material, the inquiry decided that "judgments in the dossier went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available". And, "with the benefit of hindsight", it concluded that making public the fact that the JIC had authorship of the dossier was "a mistaken judgment".
While not criticising the JIC for taking responsibility to clear the intelligence, "in the particular circumstances, the publication of such a document in the name and with the authority of the JIC had the result that more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear".
As for the notorious claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons ready to deploy at 45 minutes' notice, "The JIC should not have included the '45-minute' report in its assessment and in the government's dossier without stating what it was believed to refer to. The fact that reference in the classified assessment was repeated in the dossier later led to suspicions that it had been included because of its eye-catching character."
Less suspicion than absolute certainty, then, in the minds of the anti-war party. Yet, all this said, the former cabinet secretary not only failed to hand them a glimpse of that silver bullet, he followed Lord Hutton and insisted it didn't exist.
In general, the original intelligence was correctly reported in JIC assessments, the Butler report said. In particular, it found "no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence". And they found no evidence either "of JIC assessments and the judgments inside them being pulled in any particular direction to meet the policy concerns of senior officials on the JIC".
Most crucial, perhaps, Lord Butler's report makes clear that the Blair government's conclusion in the spring of 2002 that stronger action (though not necessarily military) was required to enforce Iraqi disarmament "was not based on any new development in the current intelligence picture on Iraq", and that the dossier "was not intended to make the case for a particular course of action". This was Mr Blair's point in an eloquent defence of his position in the Commons, fortified by Butler's conclusions that prior to the war the Iraqi regime:
had the intention of resuming pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes including, if possible, its nuclear weapons programme, once UN inspections were relaxed and sanctions eroded or lifted; and
in support of that goal, was carrying out illicit research and development and procurement activities; and
was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than permitted by UN resolutions, but did not have significant - if any - stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a fit state for deployment, or developed plans for using them.
Notwithstanding that caveat, Butler said: "It would be a rash person who asserted at this stage that evidence of Iraqi possession of stocks of biological or chemical agents, or even of banned missiles, does not exist or will never be found."
Mr Blair told MPs the context for that decision to move beyond the policy of sanctions and containment was the development of intelligence in respect of the developing threat of global terrorism.
The imperative to act was delivered by al- Qaeda's attack on the United States on September 11th. And Iraq was the country in which "we had to take a stand" because of its past use of WMD, its concealment and denial of UN authority, and the widespread belief, sustained by the intelligence, that it had a continuing and developing capacity.
On the sparse, generalised and fragmented intelligence about al-Qaeda prior to September 11th, Mr Blair told MPs, it was now widely said that policy-makers should have foreseen the attacks that materialised in New York. So, he demanded: "Had we ignored the specific intelligence about the threat from Iraq, backed up by a long history of confrontation over it, and that threat later materialised, how would we have been judged?"
Conservative leader Michael Howard said Mr Blair had "no credibility" and would not have the credibility to take the country to war again on the basis of intelligence. This could have been a killer blow to Mr Blair - but from another opposition leader, one who had not cheer-led the allies into Iraq in the first place.