Last week Tony Blair said the doubters would have to “eat their words”. But the fact remains: despite widening the definition of WMDs to include materials with considerably less killing power than high explosive, the Anglo-American alliance has yet to find anything to justify its claim that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the world.”The only true weapon of mass destruction is nuclear,” said Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University expert. Yet even though President Bush warned of a “mushroom cloud”, this was the weakest part of the case against Iraq. By the start of the war the US and Britain had virtually abandoned their nuclear claims.Chemical and biological substances can – in theory – kill millions of people, but manufacturing them is difficult and delicate. Putting them into weapons is even harder: when the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult manufactured sarin nerve agent and deployed it on the Tokyo subway in 1995, thousands of people were sickened, but only 12 died.

Even if Iraq’s allegedly vast stockpiles of anthrax material, botulinum toxin, mustard gas, sarin and VX nerve agents turned out to exist, along with mobile biological weapons labs, they would not qualify as weapons unless effective delivery systems were found as well.Some highly specific allegations, such as Iraq’s alleged possession of 1.5 tonnes of VX agent, were based on paper discrepancies between Iraqi declarations, calculations from exports to Iraq and the former regime’s claims on what it destroyed. Experts conclude that in any case, the method used by Iraq to produce VX meant it would have degraded long ago. The same was true of sarin, which Iraq could never make in a pure enough form to be effective as a weapon. Similar juggling with figures and glossing over technical details are necessary to sustain the claim that Iraq had huge stocks of anthrax.As the search goes on without bearing fruit, doubts are spreading. “It’s hard to believe that we won’t eventually find some poison gas or crude biological weapons,” columnist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times last week “But those aren’t true WMDs …

One wonders whether most of the public will ever learn that the original case for war has turned out to be false.”. President George Bush yesterday finally proclaimed “victory” in the war in Iraq amid distinctly mixed signs of progress in the allies’ efforts to start returning life to normal in the country’s capital. “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that still goes on,” he said. “The scattered cells of the terrorist networks still operate in many nations, and we know from daily intelligence that they continue to plot against free people.”As his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, held two hours of talks in Damascus with the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, Mr Bush appeared to stick to his earlier warnings to Syria, North Korea, Iran and other countries accused by Washington of helping terrorists or pursuing weapons of mass destruction.