Sometimes I wonder just how dunk you have to be before the decision to invade Iraq starts to seem like a good idea. No matter how many times the hawks change their story, regardless of how many ingenuous new justifications they can come up with, they are unable to escape the harsh and obvious reality that their war has been a disaster.
But, oh! How they try! As the situation on the ground in Iraq gets worse with each passing month, the justifications of those who initiated this bloody mess become ever more fantastical.
You will no doubt recall the original justification for this conflict: that Saddam had WMDs which were a threat to the West. That argument was finally put down after a long illness this week when it was revealed that the Iraq Survey Group have found nothing. But even before this week, it had long been apparent that the pre-war rhetoric of mushroom clouds and forty-five minute warnings was false. Even most hawks have long accepted this, though a few flat-earthers do soldier on, clinging to the belief that some huge cache of nasty toxins will turn up in the Iraqi desert one day.
Within a few months of the fall of Baghdad, it was clear that the WMD argument was taking on more water than the Titanic post-iceberg. So instead of focussing on how dangerous Iraq had been pre-invasion, hawks changed tack and started to boast about how great their new improved model would be, once the reconstruction efforts kicked in. Iraq, they promised, would become a stable democracy, a model for the rest of the Middle East to follow.
A year on, and the notion of Iraq being an example of anything remotely positive is absurd. The prospects of the country becoming either stable or democratic anytime soon look decidedly bleak. If anything, Iraq seems to be going in the opposite direction, sliding towards anarchy and perhaps even civil war.
Three hundred people died in Iraq last week, an average of over forty a day. Even the most blinkered optimist would have to admit that the day when Iraq becomes a beacon for the rest of the region is a long, long way off. With the situation in the country so grim, talk of Iraq as a great example to other states in the region has become so absurd, that even hawks have picked up on the yawning chasm which separates their rhetoric from reality.
So this week we have a new line of defence coming from the hawks' best PR man, Tony Blair. In a joint press conference with Ayad Allawi, the British leader spoke of the current dire situation in Iraq thusly:
"Whatever the disagreements about the first conflict in Iraq to remove Saddam, in this conflict now taking place in Iraq, this is the crucible in which the future of this global terrorism will be decided. Either it will succeed and this terrorism will grow, or we will succeed, the Iraqi people will succeed and this global terrorism will be delivered a huge defeat"
But what does Blair actually mean? I have heard American neo-cons speak in these terms before, saying that it's "better to fight the terrorsits in Fallujah than in New York", but this is the first time that I've heard a non-American speak in such terms.
So what if Blair is right and Iraq is the "crucible in which the future of global terrorism will be decided"? This begs the question, is this what he intended in the first place? When he was conspiring to launch the war, did Blair and his ilk actually mean for Iraq to turn out the way it has? Did they actually want a cesspit of violence on the Euphrates?
If the current sorry state of affairs was not their intention, if this was an "honest" mistake, then they can hardly claim that they weren't fore-warned. Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League, cautioned that attacking Iraq would "open the gates of hell". Millions around the world marched against the war, in part because they feared that Iraq post-invasion would descend into chaos. Even elements in the British Foreign Office and the US State Department, showing no more foresight than that which a twelve year old could muster, saw that it could all very well end in tears.
Yet on the hawks went anyway, blithely waving away all the advice. But what if they secretly knew that Moussa was right? What if they knew that all their talk of Iraqis greeting the invaders with flowers was just so much spin?
Even if this is the case, the argument currently being advanced, that it's better to fight terrorists in Fallujah than in New York, is fundamentally flawed. It's based on the premise that there are X number of bad guys in the world and it's just a matter of luring them all to Iraq to be killed. That's not how it works at all. There is no pre-determined limit on the size of al-Qaida.
On the contrary, the actions of powerful states can serve to increase the size of terrorist groups. By invading Iraq, the US has swollen the ranks of al-Qaida and other like-minded groups. Any sane person could see that such an outcome was virtually inevitable. Al-Qaida doesn't have to choose between Fallujah and New York, it can target both.
And now, thanks to Bush and Blair, it has more members with which to do this.