THERE were some classic whiffs of third-way waffle in what the prime minister had to say to the Hutton inquiry yesterday. ''The September dossier was not making the case for war - it was making the case for the issue to be dealt with,'' for instance. Or on the government's acrimonious rammy with the BBC: ''For us . . . the dispute was not what was important, what was important was the correction of the story.'' Apart from these occasional lapses into verbal blah, Tony Blair emerged from his 140 minutes in the witness box unruffled, his own account of events meshing seamlessly with many that had gone before.

It grows clearer by the day that this inquiry will not do what the government's political opponents, anti-war opinion in Britain, and some salivating sections of the media had hoped it might do, and hole the Blair administration below the waterline. Unless Lord Hutton brands the government witnesses he has called so far a colluding bunch of bare-faced liars, he can hardly conclude that Downing Street bullied reluctant intelligence advisers into sexing up the case for war against Iraq with unsubstantiated material. In terms of what we have heard so far, that means the core claim in Andrew Gilligan's original BBC report was wrong. But it doesn't mean the government is now off the hook.

The millions currently being spent in London's Royal Courts of Justice on a forlorn attempt to understand precisely why a distinguished scientist turned civil servant was driven to take his own life in an Oxfordshire wood will not be replicated, by this or any future government, into exploring why a part-time soldier from Govan, 26-year-old Fusilier Russell Beeston, should have become the latest British squaddie to lay down his life in the liberated sands of Iraq. But for as long as such blood continues to be spilled, for as long as material evidence of the threat Saddam Hussein's regime posed to the wider world eludes the occupying forces, the prime minister's judgment in taking us into this war - and committing us to this increasingly fractious peace - will remain deeply suspect.

The supposed threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and the dossier laying out the government's assessment of the enormity of that threat, may have spawned a remarkable judicial spectacle off London's Strand. But the issue hardly plays at all across the water in Washington, where the growing public hostility to involvement in Iraq is much more about post-conflict realities - the growing physical risk to US troops, and the escalating cost of the whole adventure. In an interview in Vanity Fair, America's deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, let slip that the Bush administration had settled on the WMD threat as the main justification for war ''for bureaucratic reasons''. Wolfowitz later told journalists, returning with him from a tour of Iraq, that WMDs were now a ''historic issue'' that no longer concerned him.

Tony Blair told Hutton yesterday that in the new post-9/11 global realities, Iraq stood out as ''a special case . . . a special category''. He was not pressed to elaborate on what he meant by that. But if Wolfowitz, not Blair, had been on that witness stand and had followed the line of his Vanity Fair interview, if the e-mail traffic to and from the office of the US deputy defence secretary had been exposed to public gaze the way the inner wiring of Whitehall has been, we might have read a very different story.

For the influential neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, like Wolfowitz, targeting one brutally repressive regime in Iraq was all part of a larger post-9/11 strategy for the Middle East, designed to light the touchpaper of a democratic revolution, that would spread from a liberated Baghdad through the rest of the region and neutralise the terrorist threat from the militant extremes of Islam. A victorious United States could withdraw from its existing military bases in Saudi and, as Iraq's oil infrastructure was restored, switch its own oil dependency as well as its military presence to a conquered client state. With its diminished strategic interest in Saudi Arabia, Washington could afford to let democracy roll from Iraq to its neighbours in the rest of the Middle East.

That vision is looking somewhat tarnished now. To arrive at a democratic future, it seems, Iraq has to pass through a protracted period of near-anarchy. Timescales are being adjusted accordingly. Inside Washington's beltway the talk is now of parallels with post-war Germany and Japan. This whole dialogue, from beginning to end, bears little relation to the microscopic drafting obsessions of the Hutton inquiry. But the latter remains the real threat to Tony Blair's credibility and whether the British public can ever learn to trust him again.

The most important question is not whether Saddam could have activated WMDs in 45 minutes or whether Iraq under his control posed an imminent or even an urgent threat to the wider world. The most important question is whether, in deciding to commit

his government shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington, Tony Blair was fully aware of the geopolitical objectives that those around Bush had been fermenting for years. Was that why

he thought Iraq was a ''special'' case? If it was, he certainly deceived the rest of us. If it wasn't, then he himself was duped.

For as long as the focus remains obsessively on Downing Street versus the BBC, for as long as each side sees the other's behaviour as what BBC chairman Gavyn Davies yesterday called ''an unprecedented attack'' on their integrity, that larger strategic agenda cannot be addressed. But it won't go away. Even if Hutton exonerates the Blair government for sexing up its Iraq dossier, raps it over the knuckles for outing Dr Kelly in a cackhanded way, and tells the BBC its distinction between reporting some else's claim that a government is up to no good and believing that to be the case is verbal sophistry, the bloodshed and the anarchy in Iraq will be ongoing and will compel us to call the authors of the original invasion to account.

Writing in the Guardian yesterday, the former Labour home office minister, John Denham, said this: ''What Hutton has exposed is that neither the dossier nor the intelligence assessment was designed to inform government decisions on Iraq. The real assessment had already been made by the government, and the intelligence community was asked to provide evidence to support it . . . Instead of setting out the real issues for these decisions, the government wanted us to believe it all stemmed from the intelligence assessment. Of course it didn't, and arguably, it never could have done.''

Denham wants greater transparency and honesty from government in future about the real reasons for its security and military decisions. But if we got it, the real threat to Tony Blair's premiership would surely emerge.