What about me? Photograph: AP
War. (Hurr!) What, as someone once memorably asked, is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
Well, except perhaps removing bloody dictators from power. And bolstering the international arms trade. And scoring election points against the government. Iraq is the campaign theme of the day - and probably the whole week, now that the Attorney General's legal advice has inched closer to the public domain. Tories and Lib Dems know this is Blair's Achilles heel - not necessarily because he doesn't have a defence for going to war, but because when he makes his case he sounds petulant and evasive. He lapses into 'look, I'm the prime minister, you don't understand how hard it is, leave me alone' mode.
The Lib Dems should be able to clean up on this one. Menzies Campbell, who wrote in the Observer comment pages on Sunday casting the election as a referendum on Blair's decision to take us to war, will be pleased to see the cudgels taken up by the Guardian, the Independent and the Today programme.
But as Harry points out, Campbell steers the debate sharply onto the familiar territory of missing WMD, legal advice and parliamentray obfuscation. From a tactical point of view this has limited mileage. For one thing, an argument based on Blair's integrity lets the Tories climb aboard the anti-war bandwagon despite their former support for military action. It also fails to address the equally familiar Blair defence that the ends of the war - removing Saddam - were justified whatever the means.
This is a tricky one to deal with because a meaningful cost-benefit analysis of what effect forced regime change will have on Iraq is the privilege of future historians. Fait accompli versus 'what if ..?' and both sides entrenched on different moral high grounds. No-one is going to win this argument in the next 10 days and few undecided votes are going to be swung before polling day on anti-war principle. So, ironically, the issue of the campaign that most purports to be about morality and absolute values will end up being the one most subject to tactical considerations: If anti-war Labour voters think the Tories have a chance of winning, they will swallow their pride, hold their noses and vote for Blair. If they believe that Howard is finished, they will gamble on a Lib Dem protest (with some overspill to Respect and the Greens).
