Nobody has yet managed to provide a good explanation why - even in its own terms - America needs to go to war with Iraq.

Could it be that the true, missing relation between its rhetoric and its plans lies well beyond our ability to see only two steps ahead?

For the latter possibility I have a 1960s technophobic-fantasy version. Somewhere at the renovated Pentagon there is a giant computer that simulates possible scenarios when you press ‘play’. It is a kind of an ‘international relations laboratory’ that runs alternative futures in fast forward mode.

Maybe when they ran it often enough, it no longer came up with deadly urban warfare in Iraq, a massive humanitarian problem or a wave of global terrorism. Maybe Sharon withdrew from the West Bank and established Palestine. Maybe Iran, rubbing shoulders with half a million Americans, switched to the west again. Maybe Saudi Arabia brought science back into its textbooks.

This is a simple call for the American administration to come clean - and tell us what the end-game is (or put the software on the web), and why what we think willhappen will not happen. In an age when even ‘good causes’ are questionable, how can we be expected to accept something whose relation to any cause or common-sense is so feeble? And yet we do.

Originally published as part of a debate on 12 January 2003 Writers, artists and civic leaders on the War: Pt. 1.

See also Writers, artists and civic leaders on the War: Pt. II