July 10, 2003 - Senior British Government officials, speaking anonymously of course because senior government officials always speak anonymously, are expressing doubt that weapons of mass destruction will ever be found in Iraq. That does not mean, they say, that the Second Iraqi War was not justified. It only means that the Iraqi tyrant either destroyed them before the war started or hid them so effectively that they cannot be found. At the same time Prime Minister Blair is publicly saying that he has no doubt that evidence will be found that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction programme. The only difference between the new line put out by 10 Downing Street and that emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the spelling. The terminal “me” got added on the way east across the Atlantic.

Stop a moment and think of the alternative explanations for this shift from the pre-war mantra that Saddam possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and that arsenal was a clear and present danger to the United States – an by extension – to the rest of the world, or at least to that part of it that is part of an emergent American Empire. Either Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in 2001 so large and effective to threaten America and Britain or he did not. If he had them, as both the Whitehouse and Whitehall assured us that he did, he has concealed them so effectively that they could be found by neither the intensive inspections regime of 2002 nor the 200,000 American and British boots on the ground in 2003. It follows then that the fearsome arsenal must still exist, still as potent and dangerous to the world as it was before the March 19th “decapitation” attack was launched. If it does exist then the mission to bring it under American and British control has certainly not been accomplished and Saddam Hussein knows where they are. Do you feel safer knowing that?

The possibility that a hidden arsenal of fearsome weapons is available for clandestine use would keep the denizens of the East Wing and Pentagon up at night but the evidence is that nothing is disturbing the slumber at either Pennsylvania Avenue or Downing Street. Indeed, that fearsome arsenal did not deter the occupants of either seat of English speaking power from concentrating 200,000 living breathing targets within easy range of those very weapons in the months before launching their splendid little war.

So where does that leave us? Well, like Anthony Blair and George W. Bush, I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein had a chemical, biological and nuclear weapons program – with or without the terminal “me”. And I have no doubt that both the George Herman Walker Bush and Clinton administration supported by the United Nations acted effectively to dismantle that program with sanctions and inspections and surgical military strikes. That leaves no conclusion but that the leaders of the English speaking world intentionally deceived Congress, Parliament and their people to justify a preordained war of aggression and aggrandizement. The question is now, “What did the President know, when did he know it, and how much did he tell Tony Blair?”

This war, it seems, was about the terminal “me” and the Terminal Me is George W. Bush.