Having won the war in Iraq, US President Mr George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are coming under fire at home for failing to come up with any convincing trace of Saddam Hussein's feared weapons of mass destruction.
In Washington, the US Senate's intelligence and armed services committees are soon to hold joint hearings into whether the Bush administration oversold spy data to stoke American popular support for war.
In London, where he returned from the Group of Eight summit in the French Alps, Mr Blair was bracing himself for a fierce grilling in the House of Commons tomorrow on whether his staff embellished a dossier on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, published in February in the run-up to the conflict.
In both cases, the credibility of the president who prosecuted the Iraq war, and of his staunchest ally, appeared to be on the line, hardly what they had expected when US and British forces stormed into Iraq on March 20.
Mr Blair appears the more vulnerable of the two, as he strongly sought to link the need for war to the danger of Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands.
The furore comes at a political sensitive time for Mr Blair, as his government decides next Monday whether the time is ripe for Britons to abandon their coveted pound in favor of the euro.
Mr Bush, tapping fears created by the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, pitched the war differently to Americans, saying it was a matter of safeguarding the US homeland.
No one disputes that Saddam aspired to a rich arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; many years of UN inspections, and a string of UN Security Council resolutions, attest to that.
But, just short of two months after the April 9 fall of Baghdad, coalition forces in Iraq yet to lay their hands on any of the feared weapons, or Saddam himself, for that matter.
Mr Blair vigorously denies allegations that Downing Street "sexed up" its February dossier on Iraq, which notably claimed that Baghdad had the ability to deploy some weapons of mass destruction in just 45 minutes.
Intelligence sources claimed last week that that factoid was based on just one source, and that they did not necessarily agree on its inclusion in the dossier.
As the prime minister returned from the Evian G8 summit, his spokesman in London rejected calls for an independent inquiry, although he conceded that a standing House of Commons committee could launch its own probe.
In Washington, a senior US congressman, Mr Henry Waxman, challenged the Bush administration yesterday to come clean on claims that it used forged documents to make its case for war.
"Your entire preemption doctrine depends on the ability of the United States to gather accurate intelligence and make honest assessments," said Mr Waxman in a letter to the White House.
During a visit to Saint Petersburg, Russia over the weekend, an unbending Mr Bush insisted that progress was being made inside Iraq in ferreting out weapons of mass destruction.
"We've discovered a weapons system, biological labs, that Iraq denied she had, and labs that were prohibited under the UN resolutions," he said, without mentioning any actual weapons.
In Baghdad, the US civil administrator for Iraq Mr Paul Bremer said that it was a matter of time before the full extent of Saddam's weapons program was uncovered.
AFP