There are some for whom George W. Bush – or any other Republican president, for that matter – will always be a gun-slinging cowboy bursting through the swing doors of some saloon and firing off for the hell of it. For them, the American President is an irredeemable warmonger intent on attacking Saddam with the flimsiest excuse; either because he wants to get his hands on Iraq’s oil, or because he sees in Saddam an enemy-by-proxy for bin Laden, the one that got away, or because he wants to avenge his Dad.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain views of this kind. It is over a year now since war against Iraq was first mooted, and still hostilities have yet to commence. So far, President Bush has been through all the political hoops which sceptics of war could have expected of him: he has obtained a UN resolution, built an international coalition and waited for the UN’s weapons inspector, Hans Blix, to report. Unless the director of Gunfight at the OK Corral simplified the plot for the sake of brevity, these diplomatic procedures were not generally observed in the Wild West.
Contrary to the expectations of anti-war campaigners, Hans Blix has firmly declared himself of the view that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. He has found 16 chemical warheads; a further 6,500 that existed in the 1980s remain unaccounted for. Mr Blix and his men have been refused permission to undertake surveillance flights. Iraqi scientists have been prevented from talking openly and in private to Mr Blix’s inspectors. In the absence of proper witness statements from them, the balance of evidence lies with Saddam’s sons-in-law who defected in 1998 bearing documents indicating the existence of a significant biological-weapons programme.
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