Does anyone outside Washington really know why the US is going to war with Iraq? Weapons inspectors have access to wherever they want and so far have found nothing. So why this talk of war, or invasion, of "regime change" (a euphemism for a coup by conquest)? So why does this march towards war continue, as if President Bush were an automaton, and the red button in his back has been pushed?
Is it because that's exactly what happened? Did the attacks on the Twin Towers not merely take the lives of 3,000 people, but also make him a addict to action and a slave to the adrenalin of war? So, having fought a morally justifiable and brilliantly swift war with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and then finding his prime enemy has eluded him, is he now embarking upon war almost for war's sake? It as if the toxin of Islamic fundamentalism, with its diseased devotion to murder, and its voodoo embrace of magic symbols - the Twin Towers are almost certainly represented by the numeral 11 in the date of the attack - was injected into him.
So he now seems to be about Osama Bin Laden's work, perpetuating violence and using war not as diplomacy by other means, but as an end in itself. And of course he has his poodle Blair to back him up, though almost no one else in Britain seems to have the least idea what war would be about.
Chaos theory
There's one theory that some of those exceedingly bright minds in Washington have decided on rule by the chaos theory: that the only way to bring democracy and the rule of law to the world is first by inducing a breakdown of existing political structures in the target countries of Islam. And a war against Iraq might just do the trick.
The logic runs thus. A strike against Iraq might cause worldwide chaos, bringing governments crashing down everywhere. But, the theory continues, the US will be powerful enough to ensure that the institutions which emerge from that chaos will be positively benign, lawful and democratic. This is a manifesto for revolution.
But revolutionaries, let us remember, are almost always bright; and moreover, are always wrong. Always. For the world is not a potter's wheel upon which you can shape human institutions and polities of your choosing. These are not the creations of coherent will but of time and habit. Surely the lamentable attempts of all revolutionaries, from Paris in 1789, to Dublin in 1916, to St Petersburg in 1917 to Cambodia in 1975, should be lesson enough.
Even if the US goals are not globally revolutionary, and Iraq alone is the target, what is the casus belli? That was provided by the expulsion of the UN weapons inspectors during the cretinous and morally infirm presidency of that Clinton creature. Then was the time for the US to act with clear authority; but not, dear God, after the weapons inspectors had been allowed back in.
Saddam Hussein
There are no arguments about the evil of Saddam Hussein: he is the devil incarnate. That is not the issue. For reasons which made sense then the US backed Saddam in the 1980s. So did France and the USSR. This usually causes undergraduate sneers among the right-on, Release the Colombia Three classes here. But we have no moral high ground on this: armies march on their bellies, and our beef went to feed Saddam's forces, with the Irish taxpayer footing the insurance bill to ensure the deal went safely through.
The slow build-up to invasion of Iraq has unnerving echoes of a previous attempt at regime change in the Arab world: Suez, 1956. There were genuine grounds for civilised people to oppose Gamal Abdul Nasser. He was a madman, a homicidal tyrant who murdered political opponents and expelled tens of thousands of "non-Egyptians" from Egypt.
The British, the French and Israelis used his nationalisation of the Suez Canal as the pretext for war, the real purpose of which was to overthrow him. Their operation was a military triumph, but a political and moral catastrophe. Hundreds of civilians were killed by allied bombers at Port Said, and the invaders had to retreat in ignominy.
History does not repeat itself. Saddam is an infinitely more wicked man than Nasser, and the world is a different place today. So we come to the question: Why now? The answer can only be 9/11. Osama Bin Laden sought to drag the US into a global war, and George Bush, the alcoholic who lives in awe of his father, is responding as required.
Islamic city
Since the last Gulf War, the US has spent $40 billion on perfecting techniques of war-compression, so any war is likely to be astoundingly swift. Yet human nature is not so reducible as an army, nor so predictable as the modern battlefield. How will Saudis, Pakistanis, Iranians, Afghans and Turks react when uninvited white Christian troops enter an Arab and Islamic city by force of arms?
To be sure, there is no moral contest. Saddam is a monster. Moreover, we are free because of US arms and US lives, and once there is a war, though I am against it, I shall nonetheless wish swift success to US arms as the least evil of all available outcomes.
Yet then we have to ask: if the US is successful in Iraq, where does the process of improving the world by force of arms stop? Next Yemen: then the Congo; then Zimbabwe; then Turkmenistan: then China. Suddenly we're looking at a very busy and a very unnerving future indeed.