Another take on why this four-year-old story is now suddenly big news. Brendan O’Neill says the Democrats could have ripped apart the uranium story more than six months ago, in time to divert the course of war… but they weren’t potential Presidential candidates then. Furthermore, evenn if the Niger connection hadn’t already been thoroughly discredited at the time of the SotU, experts were vocal about their doubts that Iraq could do anything to enrich uranium even if they obtained any. Given that few of the Democratic opposition (an oxymoron?) took any kind of principled stand against the war, the

…retrospective focus on the uranium claims is a cover for their own cowardice over Iraq, for their failure to take a principled stand against the war. Opposition politicians are grubbing about for something with which to beat the Bushies, as they clearly have no politics or principles with which to do the job. This sorry excuse for political opposition helps to explain why doubts about the uranium are everywhere, months after they first originated – and why someone like Senator John Edwards, who voted for war in the House of Representatives, can now get off on lecturing Bush about the ‘enormous failure’ in Iraq. The antis’ cynical approach – flagging up Bush and Blair’s lies instead of positing a principled alternative – can only harm political life in the long run. sp!ked

O’Neill acknowledges that the cheap shot is so opportune because of the squirrelly defensiveness and blame-shifting the proponents of war are doing on the issue:

Bush blames the CIA, while the CIA blames Britain’s MI6 for starting the story in the first place; MI6 is standing by its intelligence, though Tony Blair is apparently planning to ‘blame France for the uranium row’; and Niger, from where Saddam allegedly tried to buy the uranium in 1999, is said to be deeply upset ‘at suggestions that it would consider selling uranium to Iraq’

and concludes:

Those who launched the war in Iraq are now washing their hands of responsibility, defensively backtracking over the pre-war ‘evidence’.

It wasn’t the uranium story that caused these tensions within and between the Bush and Blair governments. Rather, the uranium spat has further exposed the defensive nature of Bush and Blair’s war, and its failure to unite the American and British elites behind any sense of common purpose.

As postwar Iraq spins further out of control, politicians and journalists in the West squabble over 16 words in Bush’s State of the Union address, and who is responsible for putting them there. This is about much more than a bullshit story about African uranium. The uranium spat is more like a sign of our unprincipled times.