Of course it matters if there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
To the Bush administration's toughest critics, it will mean the United States stumbled into a war or lied to start one; that soldiers and innocents died as a result of a massive intelligence foul-up or a deeply cynical manipulation of public opinion.
Even for the administration's supporters, it will mean troubling questions will linger at least until the presidential elections next year, and perhaps for a long time afterward. Among them:
What happens the next time President Bush, or another president, tells the American people a nation - Iran, perhaps, or Syria - presents a serious threat to our national security? Will the commander in chief be trusted enough to commit troops to battle?
Two months after the invasion, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, though U.S. and British officials cited stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and a program to develop nuclear weapons as justification for war. Last week the criticism became fierce on both sides of the Atlantic, some coming from within the two administrations' political parties.
WMD "is the real reason the U.S. went to war," said Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and national security studies director for the Council on Foreign Relations. The affair "feeds into the problem we already had with the rest of the world," Korb told Salon.com. "People think we're making up the rules as we go along, and that we think that might makes right."
Korb said he would advise the administration to "come clean. I'd tell them to admit what they knew, what they didn't know, and to stop playing games with us."
The attacks were harsher overseas. Blair was "suckered," said Robin Cook, the Labour Party MP who resigned from Blair's Cabinet to protest the war. "Britain was conned into a war to disarm a phantom threat in which not even our major ally really believed," Cook wrote in Britain's Independent. "The truth is that the U.S. chose to attack Iraq not because it posed a threat, but because they knew it was weak and expected its military to collapse."
Clare Short, another Labour MP who resigned in opposition to the war, accused Blair of misleading the public. "I have concluded that the prime minister decided to go to war in August sometime and he duped us all along," Short said.
Some observers, however, including some with a sense of history, say the whole issue will soon be forgotten. Few people really care, they say, largely because of the widely held belief that the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. Polling last week supports this view.
"We just don't find any strong evidence that the absence of WMD is troubling to a majority of the public, 56 percent of whom say that the war with Iraq was justified even if the U.S. does not find conclusive evidence that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," wrote Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll.
Yet this could change, he said, noting the three leading newsmagazines last week featured stories about "the elusive WMD," and Democratic presidential candidates are doubtless prepared to criticize Bush "if it appears that the American public is starting to focus on it."
Harlan Ullman is a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the man who devised the much-discussed theory of "shock and awe" as a means to quickly subdue an enemy. He taught at the National War College, where one of his students was Colin Powell.
In an interview with the St. Petersburg Times last week, Ullman said he believes the president ultimately will be judged not on the WMD question, but on a wide range of issues in the Middle East.
"The issue for Bush is less about weapons of mass destruction and more about judgment," he said. "If he is unable to successfully impose democracy in Iraq, then his judgment has failed. That's what the administration has to address."
Intelligence data has frequently been politicized, he said, citing as an example the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that helped Lyndon Johnson launch a bloody war in Vietnam. In that case, Johnson used an apparently bogus "second attack" on a U.S. destroyer to persuade lawmakers to vote for the resolution.
There is nothing wrong with "mining" intelligence data to find material to support a point, Ullman said, "as long as ideology does not temper analysis. Did that happen in this case? I don't know."
Some answers might be forthcoming.
Prime Minister Blair said last week he will cooperate with a parliamentary probe into his handling of intelligence reports. "The truth is nobody believes a word now that the prime minister is saying," Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith grumbled to the British press.
In the United States, the Republican chairmen of the Senate's Armed Services and Intelligence committees, John Warner of Virginia and Pat Roberts of Kansas, indicated they planned to hold joint hearings into how the prewar intelligence was handled. Later in the week they hedged, however, reportedly after a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney.
The administration brought much of its headache upon itself.
In his State of the Union address, President Bush made a number of statements about Iraq's weapons programs, some cast into doubt even before the war began.
He accused Hussein of "assembling the world's most dangerous weapons," and suggested those weapons included the means to produce 25,000 liters of anthrax and 38,000 liters of botulinus toxin, in addition to 500 tons of chemical weapons and 30,000 warheads to deliver the stuff. Some of the numbers were based on U.N. estimates from 1999, and some were based on U.S. intelligence, the president said.
The message was one of imminent danger. "The dictator is not disarming," he said. "Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation, the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate or attack."
Bush said the British government had learned Hussein "recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
The latter claims have been challenged by the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency. The story about an Iraqi purchase of uranium from Niger was based on crude forgeries and was known to be false for more than a year, according to the IAEA, and the aluminum tubes were not suitable for nuclear weapons production.
Made on the grand stage of the State of the Union address, the nuclear weapons allegation has troubled U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., for months. He has said he does not think the war would have been fought without it.
"Although chemical and biological weapons can inflict casualties, no threat is greater than the threat of nuclear weapons," he wrote to Bush last week, adding that he and other members of Congress voted for the use of force because of it.
In recent days, a number of accounts have suggested there was considerable conflict within the Bush administration about the value of the intelligence being used to justify the war.
According to U.S. News and World Report, Secretary of State Colin Powell was so dismayed with evidence supplied by a Pentagon unit run by deputy defense secretary and noted hawk Paul Wolfowitz, that Powell removed dozens of pages of alleged evidence against Iraq before a speech before the Security Council.
The administration's statements since the war have done little to ease the doubts.
On May 27, Rumsfeld told the Foreign Relations Council he didn't know where the weapons of mass destruction were, and perhaps Hussein destroyed them before the invasion.
Wolfowitz raised more eyebrows when he told Vanity Fair magazine "for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason" for going to war with Iraq.
Conservatives have noted that in the interview Wolfowitz cited support for terrorism and poor treatment of the Iraqi people as "fundamental concerns" of the U.S. government.
Some frustrated current and former members of the intelligence community charge members of the Bush administration, in particular Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, "cooked" the evidence.
"What is at play here is a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions," an organization called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity wrote to Bush last week. The group's steering committee includes 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, one of President Ronald Reagan's intelligence briefers from 1981-85.
"In intelligence, there is one unpardonable sin - cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy," the letter states. "There is ample indication that this has been done with respect to Iraq."
Where this will take the Bush administration is anyone's guess, but if the president has been damaged it's hard to see it. Last week he was in the Middle East, winning generally positive performance reviews as he nudged Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas toward peace.
"He looks bulletproof in this country right now," said security expert Ullman.
