Is that a weapon of mass destruction or a tin of feta cheese?

wonder which agency will he awarded the contract for planting various weapons of mass destruction in some cubby-hole on Iraqi soil, now that it is evident that the Iraqis themselves don't actually possess any.

Perhaps the whole thing has already been nicely sorted out. As I write, the US is testing a bunch of stuff in tins it says were found at an ammo dump. It'll take ages to find out if it's nerve gas or not. Why is that? It's all rather reminiscent of the `evidence' they found of yellowcake uranium — a document which later turned out to be a probable forgery and which was soon quietly forgotten.

We can be in no doubt that sooner or later the cry of faux-surprise will go up: Gaw, look at this! Would you believe it, guy! Ten canisters of anthrax and a box of sarin! Bang to rights, matey.

We know that these things will be found because the government has told us so; it is in no doubt about the matter. In the House of Commons this week, the Honourable Member for Henley-upon-Thames asked a question (yes, really, he did — you can check Hansard, if you like) of Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary. What will happen if no weapons of mass destruction are found? Boris Johnson cunningly inquired. Mr Hoon replied with that quiet authority we have all come to respect: 'They will be found.' Howja know that, Geoff?

For two weeks now the military has been telling us, as it traipses from town to town, that. oho. it's just discovered some dodgylooking canisters in a warehouse or in a cupboard under the stairs or at the back of the refrigerator. And then later it's been quietly admitted that the canisters were actually full of halva, or feta cheese, or figs.

Gas! Gas! Gas! the army cried on Day One, and dived for cover as some missiles exploded 500 yards away. But the missiles, it transpired, weren't full of poisonous gas. They weren't full of very much at all. They did no damage; nobody was hurt. They weren't even Scud missiles, which everybody assured us they were at first. They were very, very short-range missiles indeed. They were a wholly new development of modern warfare: Weapons of No Destruction Whatsoever.

And since then we've been able to see, on the television, the full extent of Saddam's fiendish, illegal, despicable arsenal. A couple of rocket-grenade launchers

welded on to the side of a motorbike. Antiaircraft guns which wouldn't trouble an aged buzzard afflicted by motor neurone disease. Cardboard anti-tank guns made to look like the real thing with a lick of paint, the intention being to convince the coalition forces that the Iraqi army had more dangerous weapons than they thought it had. Not, you will note, the other way round. I don't suppose that it is a convincing moral reason not to go to war: the fact that the opposition has utterly useless weapons. But there is something desperate, something sickening and pathetic about Iraq's total inability to defend itself, except through combat at close quarters (at which they seem rather adept and, although we were assured otherwise, committed).

Downing Street told me this week that it was 'confident' that WMDs would be found. But the Prime Minister himself has begun side-stepping inquiries about WMDs, as if they were only really an afterthought, not that important in the long run, not the real point of the whole exercise. When asked such difficult questions, he puts his patient-butexasperated face on and says, look, with this horrible regime gone, the Iraqi people will be much better off than they were, don't you agree? Apart from the dead ones, presumably. (They'll be worse off, by my reckoning.) But by and large, he's right about that, Mr Blair. The Iraqi people will indeed be better off with an American viceroy than they are now with Saddam Hussein. At the very least it means that the USA probably won't bomb them again, except maybe by accident when it's trying to hit somebody else.

And. you have to say, as a rationale for war, it gives us a useful carte-blanche to walk into Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Chad, Sudan, Somalia — oh, the list is almost endless. And may even, for some, contain Israel and the USA.

But such a rationale, tempting though it may be, isn't strictly — how can I put it? —

legal, is it? It would, instead, be illegal. It would be the launching of an unprovoked aggressive war — which is what we charged Goering and co. with at Nuremberg.

Theoretically, this would be the UN's position with the war against Iraq. The operation has never been in accordance with the UN Charter (according to Kofi Annan, speaking in The Hague one week before the outset of the war). Since the UN has taken that position, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction becomes, therefore, an irrelevancy, it was suggested to me.

But it's not. If chemical or biological weapons are found, then it can at last be said with confidence that Iraq was, after all. in contravention of the crucial UN Resolution 1441 which demanded that the country disarm. It is a strange process, I suppose, the sort of thing that a more bloodthirsty Lewis Carroll might have come up with: bombing the hell out of the country to see if there's a good reason to bomb the hell out of the country.

Almost every lawyer in the world, it seems — apart from our own Lord Goldsmith, of course — from the Society for International Law in Germany to the International Committee of Jurists across the Atlantic Ocean believes the war against Iraq to be illegal.

The International Law Project has warned, as many others have, that the coalition attack on Iraq has seriously undermined the notion of any UN-directed international law. But, it points out, It may be that international law will adapt [my italics] after the event to provide a retrospective justification for military action.'

Ah, yes, indeed. It may well 'adapt'. Which is why the spooks are probably already on the case, ensuring that Iraq does indeed possess a whole array of nasty things which can be displayed to an incredulous world, Let's hope they do a better job with the WMDs than they did with the yellowcake uranium. Either that, or prevent people looking too closely at the evidence. A quick but extravagant unveiling and then very rapid complete destruction of the stuff. Because otherwise, as the various legal committees and coalitions and conferences have averred, we will be back in a time when the merest notion of a 'just' war, however subjectively one might define it, will he sufficient for any country, anywhere, to launch an attack on a neighbour. We will be back, in other words, in about 1939.