By Rupert Cornwell
London - So where are they? In case we forget, distracted by the thought of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, looted museums and gathering political chaos: the proclaimed purpose of this war, vainly pursued by Britain and the United States through the United Nations, was to disarm Saddam Hussein and to destroy weapons of mass destruction deemed a menace to the entire world.
But where are they? A month has passed since American and British troops entered Iraq, more than a week since the fall of Baghdad. But thus far not even a sniff. Not a drum of VX or mustard gas, not a vial of botulin or anthrax, not a shred of evidence that Iraq was assembling a nuclear weapons programme.
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But that was not what they told us.
Remember Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, at the UN security council two months ago (though today it seems another age on another planet): the charts, the grainy intelligence satellite pictures, the crackly tapes of the intercepted phone conversations among Iraqi officials? How plausible it all sounded, especially when propounded by the most plausible figure in the Bush administration.
And what about those other claims, wheeled out on various occasions by US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary?
The Iraqi drones that were supposed to be able to attack the US east coast, the imports of aluminium tubes allegedly intended for centrifuges to enrich uranium, the unaccounted for lethal nerve and germ agents, in quantities specified down to the last litre or kilograms, as if exact numbers alone constituted proof. All, it seems, egregious products of the imagination of the intelligence services, one commodity whose existence need never be doubted.
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