Today's Altercation (scroll past the New Hampshire stuff) points out the way both sides of politics are only reading the parts of the Kay report that they want to read. To wit -- the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Kay has also made clear that, stockpiles or no, Saddam's regime retained active programs that could have been reconstituted at any time. Saddam tried to restart his nuclear program as recently as 2001. There is also evidence, Mr. Kay has told the London Telegraph, that some components of Saddam's WMD program "went to Syria before the war." Precisely what and how much "is a major issue that needs to be resolved." The most logical conclusion is that Saddam hoped to do just enough to satisfy U.N. inspectors and then restart his WMD production once sanctions were lifted and the international heat was off.

...

As intelligence failures go, we'd prefer one that worried too much about a threat than one that worried too little. The latter got us September 11.

And the former brought us thousands of dead US troops, scores of dead innocent civilians, and the revulsion of the global community.

The Right, however, will continue to say, okay, perhaps there weren't WMDs in Iraq -- well, excuuuuuuse me! -- but Saddam wanted them, and that was a good enough reason to invade. I want to eat an entire pizza on my own, but it doesn't mean it's time for a weight loss intervention.

But I digress.

Across the aisle, the left is looking specifically at that whole but there aren't any weapons there thing. Washington Post:

In the interview yesterday, Kay said the ISG had found some "contemporary documents" that proved Iraq destroyed weapons in the mid-1990s -- steps that were not reported to U.N. inspectors.

Senior Iraqi scientists interviewed by Kay admitted hiding their chemical and biological weapons programs in the early 1990s. In 1995, however, Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, who directed the illegal weapons programs, defected. At about that time, the scientists said they tried unsuccessfully to convince U.N. inspectors that they had destroyed their weapons and agents. They tried to "come clean, but we wouldn't believe them," Kay said.

Alterman makes the most interesting point of all, which he makes as if he's pointing at the farting elephant in the middle of the room:

What David Kay is really saying is ... drumroll please, Saddam Hussein was disarmed ... by ... Bill Clinton!

I like Eric Alterman, but I think that's a pretty large jump to make. After all, also from the Washington Post:

Kay said he believes Hussein may have been pursuing a course of "constructive ambiguity" before the war, bluffing about having weapons to give the illusion of power and to put up a deterrent. "Saddam wanted to enjoy the benefits of having chemical and biological weapons without having to pay the costs," Kay said.

The conclusion I come to is the Kay report proves that UN sanctions worked, that inspections worked. To attribute Saddam's disarmament to Clinton, however, makes little sense. How else could Saddam continue to bluff if no one was calling his bluff? Perhaps everyone already knew he was bluffing...

To this day, I hold true to the belief I had before the war, that Saddam did, indeed, need to be taken out, but it wasn't the right fight to pick at this time. We needed to finish the job in Afghanistan first -- remember Afghanistan?

The real issue the Kay report brings up is the reliability of intelligence, and the real investigation will begin when -- more aptly, if -- an independent commission can examine why the intelligence was faulty. Was the intelligence coming in the result of Saddam trying to look more powerful than he actually was, or was the intelligence doctored by the White House? This question needs to be answered by investigators now and not by historians later.

UPDATE: Corrected some grammar.