Late last January, chief U.S. weapons-hunter David Kay left his post, saying that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that most likely none would ever be found. For pro-war pundits and editorialists who had spent months issuing periodic reminders that Kay still had not yet finished his work, and that we should all wait for his final judgment, Kay's final judgment, when it came, was uncomfortably final: "It turns out we were all wrong," he mournfully told a Senate committee (CNN, 1/28/04).

But for many pundits, embarrassed by their confident assumptions that Iraq was one big chemical weapons dump, Kay left a glimmer of hope in his wake. Somehow a myth has grown up that Bush administration officials and the media, whose collective error on the WMD issue was so stunningly complete for so long, might actually have been wrong through no fault of their own. According to this theory, the blame for the U.S.'s intelligence failure should be laid at the feet of none other than Saddam Hussein himself.

One version says that although he had no WMD, Saddam engaged in an elaborate ploy to convince us he did, so as to maintain a deterrent. Another version, somewhat confusingly, says he thought he had WMD because his corrupt scientists lied to him about their progress. And sometimes the two theories are combined. The basic premise has been around in one form or another since last year (see Extra!, 1-2/04), but after David Kay finished his work in January, it has become semi-official history.

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