…the Iraq Survey Group does not confine itself to WMD. … If the report is embarrassing for the British and US governments, for those of Russia, France and China, it is damning. … The motives of those states that went to war emerge as far less tainted than those that opposed it. If the British and Americans were duped by Saddam, the Russians and French had their palms greased by him. … The stench of his crimes lingers, not only in Iraq but also at the UN.

You've heard how the Iraq Survey Group has concluded that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. You've also heard about Iraq being Bush's "weapon of mass distraction" and other barbs in the same vein. Now, the Daily Telegraph brings us Saddam's weapons of mass corruption:

Nobody will have been surprised by the conclusion of the Iraq Survey Group that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair and George W. Bush were both mistaken on this point, along with almost everybody else, including UN weapons inspectors and even Saddam's henchmen. But the Iraq Survey Group does not confine itself to WMD. It also marshals a wealth of evidence about Saddam's campaign of bribery, designed to weaken the sanctions regime and persuade the Security Council not to enforce its resolutions or to pass new ones.

If the report is embarrassing for the British and US governments, for those of Russia, France and China, it is damning. Saddam used cash stolen from the UN's flawed oil-for-food programme to induce these permanent members of the Security Council to thwart their Anglo-American allies. The motives of those states that went to war emerge as far less tainted than those that opposed it. If the British and Americans were duped by Saddam, the Russians and French had their palms greased by him.

Even so, the absence of WMD will reinforce doubts about the wisdom of the war on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr Bush was already on the defensive after Donald Rumsfeld's admission that there was no "strong, hard evidence" of Iraq's links with al-Qa'eda, and Paul Bremer's acknowledgement that his task as post-war governor of Iraq was vitiated by too few troops.

Was it all a mistake? On the contrary: the real case for war, consistently argued in these pages, depended neither on WMD nor on the al-Qa'eda connection. Saddam had to be deposed for both strategic and moral reasons, which have broadly been vindicated. Though the war on terror is far from over, the threat from terrorist states has diminished. If free Iraq can stay the course — by holding elections, by putting Saddam on trial, and by defeating the insurgency — it will have a profound impact on the other despots of the Middle East and beyond.

If anything, the report reinforces the case for regime change, by demonstrating the malign influence that Saddam's Iraq exerted over the entire international system. His capacity for genocide had indeed decayed, but by 2003 he was no longer the pariah he had been in 1991.

Having corrupted and undermined the sanctions regime, Saddam was more dangerous than ever before. The stench of his crimes lingers, not only in Iraq but also at the UN. The justification offered for the war by Mr Blair may have been the wrong one, but it was still a just war.

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