The Trump administration is increasingly resembling a government previously abominated by the current US president as entangling, bumbling, and prone to fantasies.  President George W. Bush was well versed in baseless existential threats stemming from Mesopotamia, supposedly directed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.  There was a critical problem in this assessment: in his dry drunk state, Bush was criminally wrong, proposing a doctrine in response to the attack by al-Qaeda on the United States on 11th  September 2001 heavy on violence and slim on evidence.

The patchy formulation came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, permitting the United States to unilaterally and pre-emptively attack any country allegedly posing a threat to its security despite never evincing any genuine means of doing so.  There would also be, Bush stated in his address to the nation, “no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts [of 9/11] and those who harbor them.”

Such streaky reasoning eventually fastened upon Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), apparently at the ready to strike the US and its allies.  If not Baghdad, then certainly an opportunistic terrorist proxy would be more than willing to deploy them.  In his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush solemnly stated that “the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”  Such weapons might be used “for blackmail, terror, and mass murder” or provided or sold “to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation.”

As the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq proceeded with its increasingly bloody bill of sale, there were no WMDs to be found.  Saddam, foolishly as things would have it, destroyed or disarmed those weapons he had made free use of in the Iran-Iraq........

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