SO that’s all right then — or is it? The WMD inquiry in Britain led by retired top civil servant Lord Butler has concluded after a careful investigation of the facts that the evidence on which the Blair government joined in the US invasion of Iraq was almost entirely wrong. However, Butler has gone on to conclude that no one in the British intelligence community is specifically to blame. The mistaken research had been a “collective operation”. No individual was culpable of misleading anyone else into a false position.

Butler also of course finds that the contemporary concerns of senior intelligence experts about the accuracy of the WMD dossier being assembled were entirely valid. Butler ascribes the inability of the intelligence community to sort of the wheat from the chaff to the long chain of communication through which items of intelligence have to pass.

He also makes the point that for a government to falsely claim the existence of WMD when it could anticipate that the invasion and subsequent search for such an arsenal would reveal the lie would have been “very foolish”.

Butler therefore has discharged the British government from any involvement in a plot to mislead Parliament and the voters into backing the war. Prime Minister Tony Blair acted in good faith. The September dossier, which laid before British legislators the serious threat of Iraqi WMD some of which could be ready for launch in 45 minutes, was utterly wrong but nobody realized it at the time. Butler even leaves open the possibility that somewhere within the considerable land area of Iraq, WMD might still be found. This comment resonates nicely with Tony Blair’s assertion last week that despite all the evidence to the contrary, WMD could still exist.

Only the British can manage inquiries like this that admit to errors that absolutely no one committed. Only a British committee of inquiry can manage to conclude that a policy that was based on a series of what its American counterpart described as “catastrophic intelligence failures” was nevertheless entirely justified. The Butler report suggests in essence that all the British government should be now saying is: “Woops! We mistakenly invaded Iraq. Sorry. “

But the Blair government is unlikely to bring itself to say any such thing, because it is absolutely sure that in ousting Saddam Hussein, albeit at the cost of the subsequent months of chaos and terror, it was entirely right. What it cannot bring itself to say unequivocally is that these were the real grounds for its support for the Bush attack. This is because such a move, especially when lacking UN sanction is a breach of international law.

President Bush may not fare so well when the senatorial inquiry reports on his administration’s involvement in any massaging of intelligence to justify the invasion. But that report is likely to come after the November election.