belfasttelegraph, THEY used a spectre to spook the people. Now it's become real. The atrocious bombings in Baghdad in the last few days leave little room for doubt that fighters filled with a certainty of eternal salvation are at work.
It isn't an Islam thing. It's a religion thing. Generally speaking, it's the guaranteed entry into paradise that religion alone can offer which prompts individuals cheerfully to blow themselves to bits. Who'd do it for less?
Who knows whether bin Laden is involved? But somebody out to emulate him certainly is. And that's a new thing in Iraq, an innovation.
In the weeks before war Bush and, even more explicitly, Blair, worked flat out to convince their electorates that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida were in cahoots. It was only a matter of time, we were told, before Hussein supplied al- Qaida with nuclear, chemical and/or biological weapons.
They knew this to be untrue but asserted it nonetheless, so avid were they for war. They knew because they, or their predecessors and the security agencies which served them, had been hugger-mugger with Hussein for many a year and will have understood well the ideological colouration of the regime.
Hussein in power wouldn't have given al-Qaida the time of day, much less access to weapons of mass destruction. Of course, all the indications are that Hussein didn't possess WMD in the first place. The story was doubly dishonest, a layered lie.
Now radical Islam is a major player in Iraq. Like a twist in a horror movie, the lie they used to frighten the unwary has been transformed into truth. Give them another few years and who knows what horrors they will conjure?
Any doubt as to the duplicity of Washington and London should have been dissolved by a report in USA Today a week ago. The paper got its hands on a memo sent by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on October 16 to four of his most senior officials, including his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and General Richard Myers.
“Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror?” he asked – a strange question, some might think, given that Bush, speaking at Fort Stewart in Georgia to the families of soldiers serving in Iraq, had just issued his latest assurance that the terrorists were taking a hammering. “We're rolling back the terrorist threat, not on the fringes of its influence but at the heart of its power.”
But in the memo, Rumsfeld wondered whether more terrorists were being created by the conflict than were being killed, captured or dissuaded.
He admitted the administration had no available means of measuring success or defeat in the War on Terror and posed the question: “Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madrases (Islamic schools) to a more moderate course?”
Isn't this in eerie alignment with the argument which had been advanced by doves within mainstream US (and British) politics, and derided by the hawks around Bush (and Blair) as they pressed onwards towards war?
Meanwhile, Rumsfeld has refused to comment on the remarks of his undersecretary, Lieutenant-General William Boykin, mentioned in this column last week, to the effect that the War on Terror is itself a Christian jihad, a spiritual conflict between “a Christian nation and a false religion.”
Rumsfeld said he had watched a videotape of a Boykin speech but had been unable to make out the words.
Imagine that. These people can draw exact conclusions and make life-or-death decisions from communications intercepts and satellite imagery but can't work out what's been said on a fuzzy video. Or even send somebody out to fetch a better copy.
They are ridiculous, the lot of them. They led the world into war on the basis of lies, and in the process made their lies come true. And now they haven't a clear notion what to do about it.
Meanwhile, the people of Iraq suffer on.
