A significant article in the New York Times yesterday acknowledges a fact that goes some way towards explaining the non-discovery of Saddam's WMD programme -- that the evidence for it was systematically looted after the fall of Baghdad. The claim has been made by Sami al-Araji, the Iraqi deputy minister of industry:

' Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Dr. Araji said he had no evidence regarding where the equipment had gone. But his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments...The United Nations, worried that the material could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it, largely unsuccessfully, across the Middle East. In one case, investigators searching through scrap yards in Jordan last June found specialized vats for highly corrosive chemicals that had been tagged and monitored as part of the international effort to keep watch on the Iraqi arms program. The vessels could be used for harmless industrial processes or for making chemical weapons.'

The Americans have come up with some lame excuse about not having had enough troops to guard these sites. The fact is, however, that the looting of this material was one of the gravest and most disastrous errors made by the US throughout the whole Iraq episode. Spectacularly failing to anticipate the likely chaos and ferment in the wake of the fall of Saddam -- a lesson which was surely obvious from the conclusion of major conflicts in the past -- the Americans were utterly negligent in failing to guard the likely sites of Saddam's proscribed weapons programme. As a result, by the time the Iraq survey group inspectors got to these places, there was nothing to be found.

As I reported at the time, this was one of the main reasons why Dr David Kay, the head of the ISG, blew a fuse and stormed off the scene -- because his task of finding WMD had been rendered impossible by the incompetence of the administration that had dispatched him on this fool's errand. The outcome of this incompetence has been a political and military disaster. The material has disappeared, fuelling fears that it has fallen into the hands of rogue states and terrorists and thus vastly increasing the risk of an unconventional strike against the west. And politically, of course, it has enabled the appeasenik crowd to proumulgate their logic-lite libel that since no WMD was found it never existed and that therefore Bush and Blair lied.

And of course, Bush and Blair cannot adequately defend themselves against this calumny because to do would mean admitting the very thing that Mr al-Araji is saying -- that the coalition screwed up big-time in a post-war blunder that could well have put the world in the very peril it was trying to prevent.