PARIS — Much of Europe has given a collective snort to the testimony by David Kay, the former chief United States weapons inspector, that there probably were no illicit weapons in Iraq before the United States-led war there.

"There is a kind of cynicism here," said Dominique Moïsi, a political analyst in Paris. "So the Americans lied to their people and to us and maybe to themselves. That's exactly what we already thought."

Similar sentiments rippled across the Continent, where debate on the war was split between those who believed and those who doubted American and British contentions that Iraq posed an imminent threat.

Mr. Kay's testimony on Wednesday created less derision in countries like Poland, which supported the United States in going to war. "It doesn't change our position," said Boguslaw Majewski, a spokesman for Poland's Foreign Ministry. "When the decision was reached, all the warning signals were there."

There was greater bemusement in Europe over Britain's seemingly contradictory report that chastised the British Broadcasting Corporation for suggesting that Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration had hyped intelligence reports of weapons in Iraq.

"Especially in France, there is a feeling that if the David Kay report is right," Mr. Moïsi said. "How can the BBC be so severely punished for revealing what was ultimately true?"

Some German media scoffed at the purported independence of the Hutton report, which led to the resignations of the BBC's board chairman, Gavyn Davies its director general, Greg Dyke, and Andrew Gilligan, the reporter of the original account.

"Hutton has been a servant to the crown all his life; he always knows what his duty is," read an editorial in Friday's Die Tageszeitung, a national newspaper published in Berlin. It likened Lord Hutton's role to "a football team putting up their own manager as referee and then celebrating a win on dubious penalties."

The debate over whether Iraq posed enough of a threat to justify military action revealed deep divisions within Europe, which has worked hard for decades to forge a unified polity that would eventually be able to speak with a single voice on foreign affairs. France and Germany led the opposition to the American initiative. But Spain and most of Eastern Europe's former Soviet bloc countries took the United States and Britain's side.

Most galling to France and Germany was the allegiance to the United States expressed by Eastern European countries that will join the European Union this year.

Some people in the United States and Britain have called for independent inquiries into the quality of intelligence used to justify the war and whether that intelligence was unduly manipulated. But such calls are rarely heard on the Continent.

An exception is Spain, where the government supported the American-led invasion despite popular discontent. The opposition Socialist Party has taken Mr. Kay's testimony as an opportunity to demand such an inquiry at home. So far, the government has ignored the requests.

In general, though, far less energy has been spent in continental Europe on re-examining prewar intelligence or decisions than has been expended in Britain or the United States.

Europe, it appears, would happily forget the matter and move on.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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