Quotes of the Day

The top brass of a big organization is charged with gross errors. The bosses circle the wagons until public clamor forces an inquiry by an elder statesman, who confirms the mistakes and many other management lapses but says they were the result of misjudgment rather than malign intent. Should the brass resign? In January, when the organization was the BBC and Lord Hutton concluded it had violated journalistic standards by accusing the government of sexing up the case for war in Iraq, Tony Blair was all for the departure of the BBC's chairman and Director General. Last week, though, he felt differently. This time the report was about him and his government.

The subject, of course, was those irksome Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), on which so much of Blair's case for war rested, but which don't appear to exist. Last week's report concluded that Blair took Britain to war on a false premise — but he's not to blame. Nor, as it turns out, is anyone else in particular. This was the exquisitely balanced verdict of Robin Butler, Britain's former chief civil servant, whose supple mind, service to five Prime Ministers and intimacy with Whitehall folkways fully earn him the title of mandarin. And so Blair made yet another miraculous escape — wounded, yet still alive for now.

Mandarins don't gun down Prime Ministers. In a 160-page report that Blair ordered up in February after President Bush succumbed to pressure for a U.S. inquiry, Butler found no good place for the British buck to stop. "No single individual was to blame," he said. "There was no deliberate attempt on the part of the government to mislead … It was a weakness on the part of all those who were involved." Nevertheless, though he prefers the stiletto to the sledgehammer, Butler did chronicle a damning parade of errors. It turns out that three of five British agents in Iraq whose reports helped convince London that Saddam was amassing a WMD stockpile were frauds, or mistaken. Because Saddam was such a serial liar, analysts repeatedly assumed the worst. In September 2002, when Blair's government wanted to convince the public to take a tougher line against Saddam, it turned to its top clearinghouse for secret information, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), to produce a dossier on Iraq's supposed WMD. The JIC, in particular its chairman, John Scarlett, willingly rose to the task. But the contrast between its usual role of soberly sifting shards of ambiguous evidence and the starker hues needed to make a public argument resulted in what Butler dryly called a "strain" on the spies.

Euphemisms with a sting in the tail like this abound in the Butler report. The September dossier omitted nearly all warnings about the patchiness of the underlying intelligence, yet Blair told M.P.s it was "extensive, detailed and authoritative." Later, when U.N. inspectors couldn't find much in the way of WMD, no one in Whitehall re-examined whether the case still stacked up — a lapse about which Butler said only, "We have recorded our surprise."

Blair said he "accepted full personal responsibility … for any errors that were made," but he didn't apologize. The notion of resigning over such grand mistakes now seems a quaint relic of a different constitutional era. Instead, Blair renovated his case for war, telling M.P.s it was good to get rid of Saddam in any event.

Are people buying his argument? In two by-elections last week, Labour lost one safe seat and nearly lost another — not to the opposition Conservatives, but to the antiwar Liberal Democrats. The victorious Liberal Democrat candidate, Parmjit Singh Gill, said his constituency had "spoken for the people of Britain. Their message is that the Prime Minister has abused and lost their trust." But the Lib Dems have no chance of winning the general election expected next year, which explains why one Labour strategist, though hardly exuberant, says "the result means we have won the next election." Few in Westminster disagree.

Still, Blair's stiletto wounds may continue to bleed. He has promoted Scarlett to head the Secret Intelligence Service, despite his role in adapting the dossier to the needs of p.r. Butler said he hoped Scarlett would not resign, but many are calling for him to do so. If he is forced to quit for the JIC's errors, by what logic can Blair remain? With WMD unlikely ever to be unearthed, Downing Street remains uneasy that Butler, the canny mandarin, has subtly set in motion forces that could, in ways now unforeseen, still prove lethal.

• J.F.O. McALLISTER | London
• An inquiry faults Britain's prewar intelligence — but can't find anyone to blame