The American people are unlikely to know the outcome of the White House-appointed inquiry into WMD intelligence on Iraq, to which President Bush has just reluctantly agreed, before they vote in November and decide if he deserves a second term of office. Therefore from the president’s point of view, the inquiry’s outcome is irrelevant. We can therefore be assured that between now and then the administration will maintain an aggrieved puzzlement that the weapons are not there to be found. Bush needs the American public to believe that he wants to know the answers every bit as much as they do. He will not want suspicions to harden that the White House knew all along about the poor quality of intelligence on Saddam’s WMD programs.

To have refused an inquiry would have looked like a cover-up. By announcing one now, the president also gets a political bonus. With an investigation under way, he can counter any Democrat attack by saying that it would be wrong to prejudge the inquiry’s findings. The same course worked very well for Tony Blair with the Hutton investigation.

Nevertheless the next nine months could be uncomfortable for him.

Although his administration will choose the members of the inquiry team and define as narrowly as it wants its terms of reference — an invaluable power, as the Hutton enquiry proved in the UK — the White House will be in trouble if it appears blindingly obvious from the beginning that there is a bucket of whitewash under each inquiry member’s desk. Moreover, regardless of whether the inquiry operates in public or behind closed doors, it is almost inevitable that details of the evidence will become available, either officially or through leaks. On the other hand, unless the such revelations are sensational and point directly to White House wrongdoing, this is unlikely to affect the president’s standing or his electoral appeal.

Most Americans still think that overthrowing Saddam was a good thing regardless of whether his regime had WMD or not. Furthermore, unlike the British, Bush never based his case for invasion solely on the WMD issue. Even as the US death toll in Iraq climbs, the average American is still proud of what he believes is being achieved there. As long as he does not think the invasion wrong, he is not going to care about the evidence that underpinned it.

Interestingly, there is increasing speculation that Saddam may have been bluffing about his WMD program. One source in Washington yesterday went so far as to suggest that even Saddam’s generals did not know that when their chief spoke of Iraq’s terrible powers of retribution, such weapons did not exist. This is an alluring argument for the White House because to a degree, it would let the CIA, and by extension Britain’s MI6, off the hook.

The White House may also hope that as the inquiry plods on throughout the coming nine months, people will become bored with the whole issue. If economic recovery continues and Americans can disengage from Iraq with some credit, few US voters will care on election day in November.