EXACTLY a year ago, President Bush used his State of the Union address to spell out the charges against Saddam Hussein. “The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving,” he proclaimed to the world.

Twelve months on, after the deaths of more than 500 coalition troops and countless thousands of Iraqis, Mr Bush’s two sentences were so nearly right, yet so wildly wrong. Saddam was not disarming, but that was because he had nothing to disarm. Rather than deceiving the world, it was he who was being deceived by his own scientists who had failed to build the weapons he craved.

For much of the intervening year both the Bush Administration and Tony Blair have counselled patience, insisting the WMD would turn up eventually, but this was the week that the White House finally admitted what had long ago become apparent — that the weapons it used to justify war do not exist. Mr Bush signalled the start of the retreat ten days ago when, in this year’s State of the Union speech, he offered only a vague reference to “dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related activities”.

That was closely followed by Dick Cheney, the hawkish Vice-President, stating as he flew to the World Economic Forum in Davos, that “the jury is still out” on Iraqi WMD.

Then came the bombshell from David Kay. The head of the hunt for Iraq’s arsenal for the past nine months resigned, saying he did not believe the WMD stockpiles existed.

In subsequent interviews Dr Kay said he believed Saddam had destroyed most of the weaponry after the 1991 Gulf War. “It turns out we were all wrong,” he declared in testimony on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, completed the Administration’s retreat, albeit in the most tortuous language.

“I think that what we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground,” she said. There was no doubt “that we are going to need to go back and compare what we thought we would find with what we found”.

It was not a graceful climbdown. In its efforts to escape blame, the White House achieved stunning levels of chutzpah. Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, denied that the Administration had ever identified Saddam as an “imminent” threat.

He insisted it was the media, not the White House, that was responsible for any such impression. “I think some in the media have chosen to use the word ‘imminent’. Those were not words we used. We used, ‘grave and gathering’ threat,” he said.

Saddam had grown increasingly divorced from reality, he said. Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, told Dr Kay how Saddam would send him manuscripts of novels he was writing even as US forces were massing in the Gulf.

The charge that Mr Bush and Mr Blair led their countries into war on false pretences could not be more serious. But even as their justification for war crumbled, both were handed unexpected lifelines.

Dr Kay placed the blame squarely on intelligence failures. He said that had he been in Mr Bush’s shoes he would have acted in the same way, and that there was no indication the Administration had brought undue political pressure to bear.

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