I was watching one of those fast-moving, free-wheeling debates on the Internet a few nights ago, on the subject of why Western intelligence agencies seemed to have done so badly at assessing the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

A man (maybe…one can never tell) called Rebel, who took the anti-war side of the debate wrote, just a little pompously: "This is about being responsible."

The reply, from Dennis the Pheasant, came as quickly as a flash: "No … it never, ever has been about being responsible. It is, and always has been, about getting Bush."

I think the Pheasant person got it just about right. The Democrats know they are going to have a difficult time depriving George Bush, whose public approval rating is still high, of a second term in office.

Unless, that is, they are able to find some issue that is capable of dimming his lustre a little, and going to war on the basis of exaggerated intelligence is a very promising lustre-dimmer, indeed. So it is, indeed, all about getting Bush.

At the moment, though, the American public is not greatly engaged with the intelligence issue. They seem to feel, quite reasonably, that since the war has been fought and won, and since US forces are now in Iraq, hand wringing over the circumstances of their going is a bit of a waste of time.

They'd be prepared to change their minds, I think, if evidence of some wrong-doing were found, but in the meantime, they are content to focus on other things.

The same is not true in Britain, where "getting Blair" became a little like a football riot in full swing last week, with white paint being thrown about the place, shouting demonstrators having to be removed from Parliament and a full-dress crew of journalists, politicians and outraged members of the public in full and frenzied hue and cry.

What the British public seems to want is retribution - someone's scalp on the ground to be trampled on - and they don't mind behaving like a squad of Keystone Kops to get it.

Most members of the British public seem not to be interested in letting the facts about pre-Iraq intelligence get in their way, just as they seemed not to care enough about the facts to read the Hutton Report terribly carefully.

To the extent that they do care whether the intelligence was any good or not, it will be easy to persuade them that those nice men in MI6 and the Joint Intelligence Committee were used scandalously by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair and other war-crazed villains at Number Ten Downing Street.

The British intelligence community has already begun to manoeuvre that point of view into the public eye - telling the Scottish Sunday Herald a few days ago through "a trusted intermediary" that they'd suspected all along that there were no WMD in Iraq, but that they'd been manipulated politically.

It is now certain that there are going to be analyses of the standard of intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic. The $64,000 question is whether either one of them will add anything useful to what we already know.

Three weeks after British troops won victory in the Falklands back in 1982, Maggie Thatcher set up an independent committee of Privy Councillors, under the chairmanship of the former British ambassador to Washington, Lord Franks, to review "the way in which the government departments concerned discharged their responsibilities".

That inquiry was not judicial, but it was given full access to intelligence sources and even Whitehall log books.

Because of the secret nature of a great deal of the material the group examined, their work was rather less than a sensation.

It was all pretty vague stuff in the end, and a frustrated Lord Franks was forced eventually to tell his many critics to "read between the lines".

John Keegan, who is in my book the best writer on military matters alive today, thinks the enquiries about to be held will be of about the same use as the one Lord Franks held.

"Intelligence does not provide unequivocal answers," he wrote in an article in the Telegraph last week, "but only indications, which require imagination to interpret correctly. Interpretation inevitably leads to disagreements among the intelligence officers concerned."

Critics of the controversial British Government September dossier, he said "have taken the view throughout that intelligence can and ought to be perfect, and that the editing of the dossier's contents amounted to systematic falsification. Not only does that attitude reveal the critics' complete ignorance of how intelligence is collected and assessed, it also suggests that they have not bothered to read the dossier, included complete in the Hutton report."

He feels that almost all the material in the dossier was uncontroversial. He characterised it as a completely normal document that was remarkable only for "the sobriety of its tone and the caution of its conclusions".

"Only in Chapter 3 of Part I does it include false information - that Iraq had procured nuclear material from an African country - and claims about Iraqi capabilities, such as the range of some missiles, that are exaggerated.

As to the first, that seems simply a mistake, based on what is now known to be a forged document; at least one mistake in a large intelligence assessment might be expected… "Above all," he said, "it must be remembered that British intelligence was attempting to penetrate the mentality of a man and a regime which were not wholly rational."

On the other side of the Atlantic, the administration has not accepted as readily as the British Government has, that the intelligence upon which Iraq invasion decisions was made was in error.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenet both said last week that with one or two exceptions, the allies' intelligence about Iraq prior to the war had been correct, broadly speaking.

Mr. Tenet's speech to students at Washington's Georgetown University, especially, was a detailed and vigorous defence of the work, not only of the CIA and MI6, but of a coalition of intelligence services around the world, including some in the Middle East.

Mr. Tenet made the point that while in the US, critics speak of the CIA's intelligence, and in Britain, of MI6's intelligence, they were really the same thing. The many services involved had cooperated, he said, and all of them had come to the same conclusions.

I'm not convinced that John Keegan is entirely correct that little purpose will be served by these two enquiries. It seems to me that they might do three useful things.

First, they will establish that whether the intelligence proves, with hindsight, to have been on the mark or off it, it was accepted at the time by all concerned and acted upon quite genuinely.

While a great many people have expressed the opinion that it was falsely cooked up to give an excuse for invasion, not a single shred of evidence to corroborate that theory has been produced.

Second, they might focus people's attention, once again, on the nature of intelligence. It is unreasonable to expect any service to be able to put itself in the position of knowing with certainty what its target is up to. Down at the sharp end of an intelligence service is some poor working stiff trying his or her best to find out things that other individuals…some of them extremely nasty individuals… are trying hard to keep secret.

And even if information is uncovered, it also must be interpreted properly.

There is no earthly use finding a message that says, let's say, "Send 2,000 Barrels to the Front" unless you know who sent it, when, to whom, what's in the barrels, what part of the front and whether the damned things ever got there.

The third, really useful thing these enquiries might do is to focus people's attention on what the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan, for they were really chapters of the same book) has accomplished.

Repressive regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan have been ousted.

The forces of terrorism, while not yet defeated, are in retreat. The number of places in the world where they can feel safe has shrunk down close to none. A significant number of them are helping the authorities with their enquiries. Libya has given up an advanced nuclear weapons programme. A thriving nuclear black market, operating out of Pakistan, has been stopped dead in its tracks.

Vital information about Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programmes has been uncovered, and some of the ground laid for their neutralisation.

Information about other countries that were customers of Pakistan's crew of villains has also been uncovered… I suspect we'll be hearing more about that in due course.

Critics of the Iraq War really ought to quit their kibbitzing and focus on how very lucky the world was to have had at least some leaders in place who had the courage of their convictions, and who were determined to do the things that so obviously needed to be done.

Is the world a safer place for Iraq? You bet your sweet patootie it is!