Pizzas galore!

My feelings entirely. The National Museum of Baghdad is to reopen this week with almost all of its treasures intact. Yet western academics and commentators rushed to blame the Americans for the worst vandalism since the invasion of the Mongols.

Who knows whether weapons of mass destruction will turn up like the 5,000-year-old Vase of Warka, which was returned by three Iraqis in the back of a car last week? Whether they will or not, it is at least clear to me that Wolfowitz never described such weapons as a “bureaucratic excuse for war”.

This phrase not only popped up in the same Guardian Online piece, but also in other quality newspapers such as the French Le Monde, which claimed the presence of weapons of mass destruction “was merely a pretext” for war. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung concluded: “The charge of deception is inescapable.”

How so? My reading of Wolfowitz’s comments, from this month’s Vanity Fair, is that he and his colleagues were convinced that Saddam’s weapons posed a major threat. There were plenty of justifications for the war, he explained, but “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason”.

Trying to counter these myths as they spread around the world is a boggling task. Thinking the worst about the Americans has become ingrained. Bell feels The Guardian has done all it can. “We made a mistake and we apologised for it and if people choose to ignore our correction I can’t take responsibility for them.”

Ian Mayes, the readers’ editor of The Guardian, noted in his column that it had not been the “best of weeks” for his paper, especially as The Guardian had just apologised to Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, for “locating him at a meeting which he did not attend”.

This was an alleged meeting at the Waldorf hotel in New York between Straw and Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, where they were said to have discussed the poor intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Except Straw wasn’t there.

As I passed my newsagents’ a few days ago, the weekly international edition of The Guardian was still displaying the “scoop” of the “Waldorf transcripts” on the front page. Never mind. Guardian insiders tell me they got the location wrong, but not really the gist of the conversation between the two foreign secretaries. But if the meeting never took place how do they know that? It’s rather like my friend, to whom I smugly e-mailed The Guardian’s mea culpa with the words: “This should settle matters.”

Far from it. He pinged back: “I think it only proves that The Guardian made a mistake and that Wolfie wasn’t so dumb as to have admitted that in public ... It is common sense that oil was one of the reasons for the war.”

This time I did reply: “Pah!”