The fierce debate in the US continues over the Bush administration’s oft-repeated justifications for toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime: So, where are those weapons of mass destruction, advanced as the casus belli for war in Iraq?

The failure to produce evidence of their existence is now an important issue for commentators because, beyond Iraq, it has to do with the logic of the United States’ new defense paradigm of “pre-emptive war,” waged in response to assessments by the intelligence community of imminent danger from an offending country anywhere around the world. In effect, the support of the public for such action derives from the trust it has in such intelligence and which it expects its government to portray, disseminate and interpret honestly.

In Nashville, on Aug. 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney conjured up an apocalyptic image of an Iraq in possession of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, poised to threaten the civilized world, and warned Americans that Saddam Hussein was “armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror” and stood to “threaten America’s friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.”

And in the first week of March this year, the president, in his weekly address to the nation, said: “We are doing everything we can to avoid war, but if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force.” There was even “bulletproof” evidence, according to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, of ties between the Iraqi leadership and Al-Qaeda, a claim echoed in the speech by the American secretary of state to the United Nations on Feb. 5.

So where, oh where, are these doomsday weapons? An administration that sold the invasion of Iraq to the public and to America’s friends abroad, including the Arab world, as a war aimed at dismantling the Iraqi regime’s WMD, has an obligation to tell us why no such weapons have been found. Did they ever exist? Or did the administration resort to mendacities in order to deceive us all as it searched for a prime rationale to invade.

It is now revealed that the administration doctored US intelligence by culling from it those reports that supported its position and omitted those that did not, and sought all along to discredit international weapons inspectors when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war.

On the Hill, legislators are beginning to complain that the failure to find WMD raises, in the words of Sen. Robert Byrd, “serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power.” Rep. Henry Waxman even accused the administration of using “forged” documents in making its case for military action.

Whichever it was, consider the cynical admission three weeks ago by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that the government’s pre-war warnings about Saddam’s stash of weapons were used to sell the war because the weapons were “the one issue that everyone would agree on.” (Wolfowitz’s spin master must have called in sick that day.)

Perhaps there is another reason, located in the broad design of the historical experience of empires, to account for America’s rush to war: Empires, with their large reservoirs of turbulent military and social energy, find the tawdry flatness of long stretches of peace intolerable. There is in imperial powers an implosive stress for the projection of power, the negation, as it were, of inertness.

Reflecting on the long calm that Europe enjoyed after the signing of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, a period known as la belle epoque, cultural historians, such as George Steiner, have suggested that it may have been the protracted stability of the era itself that brought about the cataclysm of 1914.

Literature on the evolution of the culture of power (consider Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” and Ibn Khaldun’s “Mukaddamah”) is replete with references to how that power is imbued with an inescapable drive toward war, toward a supremacist assertion of identity.

Don’t look, in Iraq, for weapons of mass destruction — a story that has no legs. Look for how the United States, as an imperium, needs, in a time of serene peace, a purging fire to define itself.

- Arab News Opinion 3 July 2003