Gimme a W! Gimme an M! Gimme a D! What’s that spell?
From Scott Rosenberg…

“As the statues of Saddam fall and waves of euphoria swell through Fox-News-land, unchecked by cautions from Bush and Rumsfeld, one little issue haunts the war effort: The reason we went to war in the first place remains strangely elusive.

The imminence of the Iraqi threat that the Bush administration identified as its reason for invading Iraq now, rather than wait for further U.N. inspections to do their work, was a matter of “weapons of mass destruction.” Iraq, we were led to believe, was a teeming arsenal of chemical poisons and biological weapons, and was on the verge of developing nuclear capabilities. At any moment Saddam might hand over such weapons to terrorists so they could wreak havoc on the homeland. There was no time to waste.

So far, however, the war in Iraq has been remarkably free of usage, or even sightings, of “WMD.”

There are many possible explanations: Maybe Saddam hid everything really well. Maybe he didn’t want to use these weapons because he knew that would convict him in the court of world opinion. Maybe he simply didn’t have such weapons on nearly the scale the U.S. charged.

We may never know the full story, but we will learn a lot more as the U.S. tightens its grip on Baghdad and the countryside and begins a more systematic search. Sooner or later, we will have a pretty clear idea whether Iraq was or was not teeming with WMD. A lot hangs on this. And if it turns out that the Bush administration’s claims in this area were inflated or wrong, it will be very interesting to see how the issue gets spun.”

Calendar ambushes

Two years ago today, my life fell apart. Sue and I had taken the children to Disneyland Paris for the weekend. We both loathed the place, but it was impossible not to revel in the pleasure the kids took in the park, the hotel (where we had a suite), the exotic experience of being abroad in a non-English environment. And then when we were dressing for breakfast, she came out of the shower, deathly pale, and said she had found a large lump in her breast. We knew it was serious from the word go. The drive back to the UK, during which we had to maintain an outwardly calm appearance for the sake of the children and the friends with whom we had embarked on what had seemed such a frivolous adventure, was the longest and most traumatic journey I’ve ever undertaken, but it was as nothing compared to what lay ahead. Eighteen months later, the love of my life was dead.