It’s too late now but I wish Lord Hutton had time to squeeze in another witness statement before he delivers his judgment tomorrow. Exemplary as I’m sure his report will be, it would still be so much better if he could only question the one world leader who could put matters properly in perspective. The US President who has so much to answer for: Bill Clinton.

At the heart of the debate around Hutton is the question of assessing intelligence threats. And it is on that subject, with allegations of intelligence failure ringing in our ears this week, that Bill has a story worth hearing.

In 1998, the Clinton Administration launched missile strikes against targets that they believed were linked to al-Qaeda. Those attacks were designed as a response to the bombing of US embassies ordered by Osama bin Laden and carried out by his confederates. The President was acting in line with National Security Council advice, but he was also embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky affair at the time and his motives in responding as he did came under immediate attack. Just months before the missile strikes were launched Hollywood had released a movie, Wag the Dog, in which a fictional president facing a sex scandal starts a war as a diversion. For the press corps, and the opposition, the juxtaposition was too tempting to ignore and Clinton was accused of acting out of narrow political interests rather than in a statesmanlike fashion.

Clinton was so wounded politically by these allegations, according to National Security Council staff, that he issued instructions that no action was to be taken against terror threats unless an unanswerable case could be made on the intelligence. Since anti-terrorist intelligence, by definition, deals in probabilities and not certainties the National Security Council could not provide him with the absolute assurance he craved before he could authorise action.

The result? Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda enjoyed two years untroubled by Western counter-measures in which to prepare for September 11. The moral? If you wait for certainty before acting on intelligence threats, the only thing you can be certain of is that innocents will die.

The essence of prudent statecraft is anticipating dangers, not waiting upon events. But that lesson, reinforced by the events of 9/11, is being challenged this week. Instead of accepting the principle that we are better safe than sorry, proponents of a new consensus want our leaders to say sorry for trying to keep the world safer.

The advocates of inaction made their voices heard during the Hutton inquiry. The Iraq war, they argued, was fought on a false prospectus. The Prime Minister, they claimed, exaggerated the threat we faced, “sexing-up” the intelligence he received. The resignation of the arms inspector, David Kay, from the Iraq Survey Group after finding no major stockpiles of WMD has provoked further allegations that Britain and America acted recklessly in seeking to defang a tiger which was nothing more than a toothless old pussycat.

It does appear to be true that the intelligence on which the West acted had flaws. But that does not invalidate the action taken in Iraq. As any dispassionate assessment of the evidence shows.

In the first instance it is just not true to assert that Saddam had abandoned efforts to acquire biological and nuclear weapons, even after years of sanctions and inspections. According to David Kay, Iraq was “researching better methods” of weaponising the deadly poison, ricin, “right up until the end”. And Saddam did make an effort to restart his nuclear weapons programe in 2000 and 2001. Western intelligence agencies may have miscalculated the precise nature of Saddam’s WMD arsenal, but they were right to conclude that the Iraqi dictator remained an active player in the mass-murder marketplace.

It was therefore not only reasonable but justifiable, with full hindsight, to conclude that the only way to eliminate the threat of an Iraqi regime armed with WMD was to change that regime. That was certainly David Kelly’s view.

In the aftermath of 9/11 no responsible Western leader could afford to be blithely unconcerned about a state which had sponsored terrorism potentially acquiring the world’s most terrible weapons. There was a widespread consensus, even among those intelligence agencies which served governments opposed to the Iraq war, that Saddam was pursuing WMD programmes. If Bush and Tony Blair had insisted on the same level of total certainty before acting that Clinton had eventually insisted on they would have been staking their people’s lives on a hunch that Saddam could be trusted and the world’s intelligence services could not. That is not a gamble a responsible leader could have taken.

There were, of course, risks in the path that Bush and Blair followed. But no course in foreign policy is risk free. Indeed the studied avoidance of danger is perhaps the riskiest path of all. Inactivity in the face of provocation sends a signal to all who would play the bully that there is no price to be paid for their defiance of the rules. Resolution in tackling threats achieves the opposite effect — it encourages those who might have wished us ill to make terms and talk peace. Already, in the aftermath of the Iraq action, Libya has been persuaded to disarm, Iran has begun a process which could reduce the threat of it going fully nuclear and even North Korea may be more tractable.

The greatest danger we now face is that those gains will be jeopardised by a new consenus that dictates that we can only ever intervene again if the threat is so obvious that it is staring us in the face. Because by that time, as America discovered two Septembers ago, the threat will have us by the throat.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

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