The Prime Minister made a slightly better fist of the case for the Iraq war on the Today programme this morning (8.10am). At least he tried to relate the UN resolutions not just to the legality of the war but to the nature of the threat posed by Saddam. Even so, he didn't get very far in nailing that key issue of the nature of the threat to us all posed by Saddam. Once again, one has to ask why.

One reader has written to suggest that he didn't get much of a chance, given the barrage of inane and partisan questions being put to him by John Humphrys. Apparently he did rather better on GMTV, which I didn't see, where he was given more time to develop his answers. This reader also suggests that he seems to perform better once he has warmed up, and the Today interview had been pre-recorded early.

Well, maybe there's something in that. But it still doesn't solve the mystery of why Blair doesn't refer explicitly to Saddam's long history as a key sponsor of global terrorism. Simply by noting, for example, that the Salman Pak terrorist training camp in Iraq trained terrorists in plane hijacking on a full-scale areoplane parked in the camp would have taken the wind out of Humphrys's ignorant and bigoted sails.

Another reader suggests that Blair simply realises that there is unfortunately no argument and no facts on earth which will alter the mindset of the millions who are certain that he took us to war on a false prospectus; as a result, any additional facts he adduced at this stage would be regarded as yet more lies and would deepen his difficulties. I sympathise with this point of view, since I tend to feel similar despair at the terrifying irrationality and denial of truth that seems to have replaced intelligent and informed debate in this country. And yet even so, I cannot accept it. I still believe that truth drives out lies, and that the principal reason why so many people now swallow the Michael Moore-esque fantasies spouted by the Humphrys tendency is the ignorance that has developed among the public. And this is partly because of the role played by the malign and lazy media, but principally because the Prime Minister allowed so many fundamental misapprehensions to develop -- such as, for example, that the reason he took us to war was that Saddam had actual weapons of mass destruction. Yes, Blair and the rest of the world thought he did have them; but the real issue was that if Saddam was left in place he would have continued to develop them, an assumption which has been borne out by every piece of evidence and every official report into the whole wretched business.

When this WMD myth first took hold, Blair should have marched into the Today studio and firmly told Humphrys that this was a lie. But he didn't. He gave the impression instead not only that he was too frightened to be questioned by Humphrys, but that he had no answers to this and other absurdities. And even now, he has made things yet more muddled by this apology for intelligence that was wrong (Was it? As he half suggested this morning, he seems not to think it necessarily was) while failing to hammer home the point that only some of the intelligence -- about the existence of stockpiles -- is questionable but the rest of it was right on the button.

As I said yesterday, if the intention was to draw a line underneath the issue and move on, I don't think he's succeeded. The acid test will come when he has to decide what to do about the fact that the ayatollahs in Iran are shortly going to have nuclear weapons. This country has now been well and truly softened up for surrender to these and other forces of darkness. By abandoning an argument that he never made properly in the first place, the Prime Minister has helped ensure that, as the decisions he is forced to make become progressively even more difficult, the pressures upon him from the British people will be huge, and impelling him in precisely the wrong direction.