Like father, like son?

For a moment in early May, American neoconservatives thought they had died and gone to heaven, so much did Bahgdad seem to them to resemble paradise. Their vision of an America that would shed its paper-tiger hesitation and boldly use its overwhelming military power to crush tyrannical regimes and reshape the world for decades to come by establishing American-style democracies in their place seemed well on its way to realisation. As the months have passed since then, however, the whole project is increasingly foundering on a very large rock – the apparent absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq.

In the United States, as in the United Kingdom, the main explanation given to the public for the necessity of going to war with Iraq was the imminent threat of WMD and the possibility that Saddam’s alleged close ties to terrorists could result in al-Qa’eda obtaining such weapons. Now that the weapons are proving hard to find, the under-secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservatives have begun to argue that the threat of WMD was only one of a number of reasons for the war and not necessarily the most important one.