Overall, the capture of Saddam Hussein seems to have made little difference to the level of resistance. This is not immediately obvious, because the number of attacks on US forces is down to about 17 a day now, compared with twice that two months ago. But this is in large part because, eager to cut their casualties, US commanders cut the number of patrols they carry out by two thirds from 1,500 a day in November to 500 a day in December.

One of Dr. Kay's most important observations cut the legs out from under those who insist the president and his subordinates ? in particular, Vice President Dick Cheney ? manipulated the intelligence they received from the CIA and other agencies. "In the course of [his work in Iraq], I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance. And never ? not in a single case ? was the explanation, 'I was pressured to do this.' The explanation was very often, 'The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it.'"
He went on to note that, "...Almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that. The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong and we've got to figure out what was there. And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis."

Even if Democratic presidential candidates refuse to acknowledge it, David Kay's testimony actually confirms the president's most important claim to reelection: He spared us the very difficult problem of having to do something about the "Butcher of Baghdad" after the U.N. had let Saddam out of the so-called "box" in which he was supposedly being "contained."