WHAT WITH ONE THING AND ANOTHER, IT'S A TUG OF PEACE: Paul McCartney has been thinking about Iraq, and, about a year and a half after the Rest of the Entire World, he's decided it's a "new Vietnam". In an interview with Spanish media:

"He added that the ideals of the allied nations to restore democracy in Iraq and find weapons of mass destruction were "good arguments." But, he said, the WMD had clearly not been found and the conflict continues to worsen.

Except, of course, there was never any mention of "restoring democracy" at the time, and the arguments about the need to find those lorries stacked full of botulism and anthrax and to ensure that Saddam wasn't harbouring enormous levels of cooties weren't good ones - they were clearly pisspoor arguments that children of three could see through. Even Richard Perle on this morning's Today has more or less given up trying to pretend that there was any real WMD basis to the war, employing some odd "ah, but if he'd had the weapons we were saying he'd had, it could have been real nasty" double speak. Incidently, Perle was also hilarious on the attempts to reverse engineer the 'freeing the Iraqi people' justification for war - he started to go on about how nobody had a problem with the Allies taking on Hitler to save the Jews, until John Humphrys pointed out that, erm, the Second World War was triggered by the invasion of Poland and the end of the holocaust was a happy by-product; then when asked if we really did go to war to help the Iraqi people, when will we be going into Sudan, Perle sucked his teeth and explained that, you know, America's losing its appetite for wars of liberation, what with all the flack they're getting for this one in Iraq...

But back to McCartney - does he really believe that WMD has been "not found"? Rather than "wasn't there in the first place?"