MEMORIAL: Today's Guardian has a special edition of G2, offering brief histories of one hundred of the dead in the Iraqi war - servicemen shot by machine gun bungles alongside twelve year old schoolgirls hit by missiles. While the pro-war side continue to argue about what, exactly, they were fighting for, the anti-war side is able to point clearly at exactly what we were fighting against.

 
YESTERDAY'S LINE: Gotta love John Reid; following on from his meaningless IRA analogy, he's now moved on and on Today yesterday morning started to try the contention that saying that not finding WMD undermined the case for war was like saying that never finding the cash from "the great bank robbery" (sic) means that Ronnie Biggs wasn't guilty. Er... right, John.

 
A NEW LINE OF THE DAY: John Reid was just on Today, trotting out the new line for the non-discovery of WMDs - apparently, since we've never found a large arms cache in thirty five years of seeking out IRA weapons, we shouldn't be surprised that nothing has turned up in Iraq yet.
They really are just treating us with contempt now, aren't they?
Firstly, much of the IRA's weaponry would have been held over the border in the South, and so hasn't been being searched for for anything like thirty-five years. Secondly, it's turning out more and more that the UK authorities did know where many of the IRA arms were, , as they were paying people to use them. More importantly, Northern Ireland wasn't a state which had supposedly been liberated and was full of locals willing to help Uncle Sam do everything they could to erase the memory of the previous leadership; a few guns are easier to hide than a plant making weapons of mass destruction; the search for the IRA arms cache wasn't aided by american satelitte spy technology and a few weeks before the searching started no high ranking member of the British government had gone in front of the UN to show evidence of the IRA's weaponry.

 
SHORT AND CURLIES: So, Clare Short's conscience finally arrived (nb: not Claire Short with an 'i') - I've known Parcelforce deliveries turn up more promptly. What's curious is not that she believed Blair's assurances in the first place - c'mon, it's not llike he was in charge of the decisions, to take his word would be like accepting a Sainsbury's checkout operator's assurances on the company stock's future performance - but that, if the cabinet was as terrible as she makes out, how the hell she managed to sit there comfortably for all these years.

 
MISUNDERSTANDING OF LOGIC: The noted - perhaps, actually we've never heard of him before - columnist Chad Selweski says that it's logical that if Saddam had no weapons, he would have shown that he had none, and saved himself. Righto, that makes sense. It's not like the Americans were going to invade whatever, is it? And that you really, no matter how hard you try, can't prove a negative? And, of course, Saddam was an evil, difficult fucker who wouldn't have admitted to having a moustache and a beret if the US had demanded it.
Chad Selweski does acknowledge what our response would be - if saddam had weapons, why didn't he use them to save his regime - but the best answer he can come up with is that he buried them in the desert, or maybe gave them to Al Qaeda.
Right, that makes sense, then. "I have my back against the wall; my troops cannot fight the might of the American army. I know, I'll bury these weapons which would give me an unfair advantage and the only chance of keeping hold of power in the middle of the desert." Okay. Or maybe: "I'll hand these weapons to the terrorist group whose aims and ideals don't actually match mine at all, rather than use them to save my regime. My power may be destroyed and my country lost, but at least people I can't stand may get some glory later on."
Chad frets "The tyrant was full of tricks. Dead or alive, maybe he can wound us without firing a weapon simply by making us look foolish.
If the WMD are never found, U.S. credibility will be hurt and our effort to track leads against terrorism, and to seek help from allies in nabbing al Qaida operatives, could suffer."
Saddam doesn't need to make the US look foolish. And we're not snickering at the lack of WMD discoveries, Chad. We know that the "weapons" will turn up - we suspect they're probably out in the middle of the desert burying them right now.