As an MSNBC analyst before the war, former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay often seemed more like a cheerleader for the Bush Administration's Iraq policy than he did an impartial expert on Iraq's weapons programs. So it was not surprising that the White House tapped him last summer to lead the effort to locate such weapons.

Now, seven months later, Kay has resigned, concluding that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program and possessed no biological or chemical weapons. "I don't think they existed," he said of the latter in a Reuters interview, explaining that they were eliminated in the mid-1990s by UN inspectors and by Iraq itself, and that there were no significant efforts to make new ones.

The justification used by Kay and other weapons experts who supported the US case a year ago is that even the UN inspectors believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But in fact, chief inspector Hans Blix went out of his way before the war to say that the UN inspectors did not know whether Iraq still had proscribed weapons.

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