Is G W Bush's foreign policy ethical or is it just murderous blather?

There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable, for in politics there is no honour.
-Benjamin Disraeli

To expect that politicians should always tell the truth, keep their bargains and not subvert the public trust is probably too idealistic.

Perhaps the only important thing is that they should not be so indifferent as to be caught out.

All's fair in love, war and politics.

But the argument is certainly one of ethics, though the threshold is not necessarily an absolute, but rather one where people might say, "They have gone too far this time."

A number of recent crises in foreign affairs has raised considerable alarm, as well as a resurgence in the ethics of international relations.

The war in Iraq is the latest case in point, with the questions surrounding Iraq's putative missing weapons of mass destruction taking on added urgency.

Where are the massive stockpiles of VX, mustard and other nerve agents that we were told Saddam Hussein was hoarding? Where are the thousands of gallons of botulinim toxin? Where are the components of his nuclear aresenal?

The stark reality is that two months after the fall of Baghdad, the United States, together with its allies, has yet to find any physical evidence of those lethal weapons.

Could they be buried underground? Were they destroyed before hostilities? Have they been shipped out of the country? Do they actually exist?

Equally important, how reliable were the claims of the Coalition of the Willing that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and present danger to the international order, so much so that a preventive war was justified?

Today, it is clear that not only was the intelligence on which these claims were based was doubtful, but also that our political leaders probably lied to us.

Don't get me wrong, I fully expect that for the sake of political survivial, some politicians will find it necessary to lie.

Richard Nixon stonewalled the Watergate inquiry until it became hopeless; Ronald Reagan ("I don't recall.") had no memory of the Iran Contra scandal; and Bill Clinton ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman.") just kept on lying until he was impeached.

Other times, politicians are indeed obliged to lie to us.

During World War II, for example, John Curtin never told the Australian people how bad things were in February 1942.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, for his part, kept on lying to the American people until the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbour finally got America into the war with Hitler.

In my own time, I can still remember Dwight Eisenhower telling us that there were no U2 flights over the Soviet Union until of course the Russians shot down Gary Powers and put him on trial.

I can also remember John F. Kennedy telling the world that he did not cut a secret deal (US missiles out of Turkey) with Moscow to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba.

These were state secrets at the time and therefore acceptable.

What is not acceptable is the murderous blather of politicians who put their own people in harm's way, for political ambitions.

This not only unethical but potentially dangerous.

Lyndon Johnson lies about the Vietnam War, America's longest war, resulted in an unmitigated disaster, costing tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

It was a tragedy waiting to happen.

Today it is as though George W. Bush has learned nothing of the lessons of Vietnam.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been less than candid with the facts.

9/11 was a terrible crime but first and foremost an intelligence and law-enforcement failure, not a national security issue. Not enough to round up an international posse, charging across borders at will. There are other ways to get the bad guys.

Bush's reason for doing so was obvious.

It was always going to be easier to deal with terrorism as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States than as Chief Executive of the American government.

As chief executive Bush was on shaky ground; as commander-in-chief he could make things happen in a hurry. Forest Gump had been promoted overnight.

Bush also took advantage of America's hurt and insecurity and played it for all it was worth.

He also knew full well that he could not diminish the possibility of terrorist attacks on American soil by getting rid of Saddam Hussein, who was clearly regarded as an inauthentic Islamic leader by al-Qa'ida. His Ba'ath party was not religious and Saddam was not a radical like Osama bin Laden, though no one doubted that he was a killer-tyrant.

How Bush succeeded in deflecting American anger from bin Laden to Saddam was one of the great public relations con jobs in the long history of government con jobs.

And it gets worse.

The Bush campaign to kill the Iraqi leader, frankly admitted at the highest levels in Washington, has committed America for the first time to public, personalised assassination.

The predictable argument is Saddam's survival encourages resistance. The sad truth is that the US has never openly before marked a foreign leader for killing.

This kind of thing can go terribly wrong, as the bombing of the American airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 souls, was probably Colonel Qaddafi's revenge for the death of his daughter, in Reagan's botched attempt to take out the Libyan leader.

In any case, what better way to get rid of the only person in the world who could tell us what happended to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Or better yet, what Iraq intended to do with them. That is the million dollar question.

It will get more and more difficult for governments to sell their people on the necessity of being good international citizens when their leaders act like Tony Soprano.