You can almost see the talon marks on the crossbar.
Sometimes I think I must have amnesia. Recently I've noticed some in the pro-war camp attempting to put about the notion that the conflict in Iraq wasn't really about WMD after all. With the absence of those stockpiles of nasty weapons, they have tried to pretend that the case for their aggression in the Middle East did not rest on Saddam's non-conventional capabilities. This is rubbish.
I don't have amnesia. I remember the run-up to war well. The fact is that the war in Iraq was about WMD. It was about a threat of non-conventional attack by Saddam which was so grave, so imminent that, apparently, only immediate, pre-emptive invasion could prevent it. This was the crux of the case for war as it was presented by the hawks in London and Washington.
To argue otherwise is to indulge in the crudest historical revisionism and, quite frankly, to insult the intelligence. I know that we live in a world where many people, especially the young, know next to nothing about history. I know that many of us flick idly from channel to channel, with all the concentration of a goldfish. But surely, even in a worldlike this, anyyone who is remotely politically conscious can remember "all" the way back to late 2002/early 2003 when the war drums were being beaten by Bush, Blair et al. Surely everyone can recall that the threat posed by Saddam's WMD was the principle justification for going to war. I really do despair if this is not the case.
Of course there were other arguments used to try to win support for the approaching invasion - that Saddam's regime was evil, that a new democratic Iraq would emerge from the rubble, even, bizzarely, that war would help to restore the UN's credibility. But these, and other reasons, were very much secondary to the WMD issue. They were extras - useful but not essential.
The over-riding reason for the need for war was always presented as Saddam's WMDs. This was the issue on which the "coalition's" flimsy legal argument hung. This was the issue which was used to convince/terrify sections of public and political opinion in both the US and UK into supporting the war. If Congress and the House of Commons had known then what they know now about Iraq's non-conventional capabilities they would not, in my view, have green-lighted the war.
So, the absence of those promised for stockpiles is a serious issue for hawks, and one they can not collevctively doge by cack-handed attempts at revisionism. I have no problem accepting that, for this or that hawk, "it was never about WMDs". I have no problem accepting that some people supported the war mainly because they wanted Saddam gone, or because they thought it was trhe best way to bring democracy to the Middle East. But the individual preferences of hawks does not change how those in power justified the march to war.
As long as WMDs do not turn up in the quantities promised pre-war (and even diehards in Washington an London have begun to accept that they won't) then we are left with one of only two conclusions. Either Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, Howard et al made an honest mistake in believing that Saddam had stockpiles of WMDs or else they deliberately distorted the intelligence available in order to scare parliaments and publics into supporting a war on which they were already hell-bent. Either way, it raises serious questions about their fitness to continue governing.
They should all now be "considering their positions". If, as seems inevitable, they will not go voluntarily, it is up to the voting public to do the job for them.