Politics & Power Quote by David Kay

A scientist who spent a career inside the machinery of verification is suddenly talking like a press secretary: not proving a claim, but distributing responsibility for having believed it. David Kay’s intent here is narrowly tactical. By invoking Jacques Chirac, he’s building a bipartisan, even international alibi for the Iraq WMD consensus: if France’s famously skeptical leadership once gestured at Iraqi WMD, then the prewar intelligence failure wasn’t just an American lapse or a neocon fabrication. It was, he implies, a reasonable inference shared across governments.

The subtext is sharper than the syntax. “As I recall” is doing quiet legal work, lowering the evidentiary bar from documentation to memory. “Referred to” is another hedge: it suggests acknowledgment without pinning Chirac to a concrete, falsifiable assertion. Kay isn’t arguing that Iraq had WMD; he’s arguing that the belief in WMD had a wide enough footprint to dilute blame.

Context matters because Kay became a key figure in the post-invasion search for weapons that never materialized. In that moment, credibility is currency, and Kay is trying to protect two things at once: the legitimacy of the intelligence community’s methods and his own role within the story. The line is less about Iraq than about narrative triage. It’s an attempt to reframe the scandal from “manufactured casus belli” to “shared misreading,” where the real failure becomes interpretation, not intent.