The Kerryness of Kerry

I initially wanted to give numerous samples and commentary, but decided that it's best just to go read Mark Steyn on Kerry. Heeeeeelarious!




UPDATE: An older article about WMD's in Iraq

I had a weird experience a few days ago. I flew from the Middle East to North America. In Iraq, 95 per cent of the people I met told me they were happy to be liberated and regretted only that various disappeared loved ones weren't around to see it. In the US, the great victory has been digested and folks have moved on to newer distractions, like the travails of the indicted style guru Martha Stewart. In their different ways, these are both rational reactions.

But, en route from east to west, I briefly touched down in the strange area known as "Europe", where possibly due to a freak electrical storm or some other phenomenon the people of Britain appeared to be in the fevered grip of some mass psychosis, perhaps a variant of Sars (Sudden Alternative Reality Syndrome). Peter Worthington, the Canadian columnist and veteran of the Second World War and Korea, likes to say that there's no such thing as an unpopular won war. Tell it to Downing Street. If I understand correctly, the British, having won the war, are now demanding a recount. Across the length and breadth of the realm, the people are as one: now that the war's out of the way we can go back to bitching and whining that Blair hasn't made the case for it.

This is all very odd. In Kirkuk the other day, they found another mass grave, this time with the bodies of 200 children who had been buried alive. Yawn. Doesn't count. Wake me if they find a toxic warhead among the teeny skulls. The naysayers were wrong on so much - millions of refugees, Vietnam quagmire, Stalingrad, etc - you can't blame them for clinging to the one little straw that hasn't shrivelled up and slipped between their fingers: Come on, Tony, where's the WMD?

Or as Iain Duncan Smith put it in the House of Commons: "The truth is nobody believes a word you say now."

Well, I do. Because what Mr Blair said is not only in line with what American officials told me, it's in line with what Continental officials told me - as recently as two weeks ago, when a big-time Euro paused midway through his harangue about the illegality of the war to assure me that "of course" Saddam had been up to WMD monkey business.

That's why, if you notice, the axis of weasels (France, Germany, Russia) and its short-pants league (Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada), while undoubtedly enjoying Mr Blair's discomfort, have nevertheless declined to join in the show-us-the-sarin taunts. They know what their intelligence services say (assuming, for the purposes of argument, Luxembourg has an intelligence service), and it's the same as the British and Americans. The Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition is presumably privy to more high-level briefings than I am, so his tawdry opportunism is especially contemptible.

What IDS merely implied, Max Hastings spelt out in these pages last week: "The Prime Minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit." Sir Max, the liberator of Port Stanley, has somehow morphed for this war into Belgrano bore Tam Dalyell: his thesis is that Blair and his American masters lied to the world about Saddam's arsenal in order to justify an invasion that would prove no such arsenal existed and that they were a bunch of liars.

That's the setup for this. Pay attention now.

Insofar as this is a serious argument, let's rebut it in terms the armchair accusers can understand: Liberty. Not the liberty George W Bush has brought to Iraq, which Eurosophisticates are so sniffy about, but the Liberty on Regent Street. I once ordered a sofa from Liberty and, as is the way, I had to wait till they made it. They didn't have the sofa itself, but they had sofa capability. That's what counts: capability, not inventory. It would obviously be easier to wait and pick the evidence of WMD out of the rubble of Birmingham, but for the Americans it's capability that's the determining criterion.