Shock, horror!

So Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction? In the "well, what a surprise" stakes that probably ranks up there with being told that Stephen Hawking will not be representing Great Britain in the triple jump at the 2008 Olympics. But there you go, it looks like there's finally going to be an official admission that, oops, no, we were wrong, and, well, we blatantly lied about the whole thing to give us a pretext to invade. Sorry!

I never genuinely believed there were WMDs anyway (who did?), yet I still was not opposed to the war. Whilst despising Bush and his cronies and being naturally suspicious of everything they stand for, I believed that overthrowing Saddam Hussein's vile junta would be a good thing for the region and the world as a whole. Some good has come out of it: there is now a fledgling democracy in Iraq where once there was a murderous and genocidal regime. This is no small thing. The real battle is to get democracy bedded down and withstand the murderous intentions of a minority of Islamofascists. The concern is that the killings will create too much political heat causing the US to panic, withdraw completely and leave it all in chaos. After coming this far, any such action would be murderously irresponsible.

With any luck, Chimp-in-Chief George W Bush and the neo-conservative, Christian-right shitbags that accompany him will get the boot in November. John Kerry can then come to the helm and foster an international solution to the problem. It is imperative that democracy gets a foothold in the area: a genuinely popular, fairly elected government in the Middle East would be a real step forward. If it took manufactured threats about weapons of mass destruction to get the ball rolling then it will have been a small price to pay.