'None dare call it Treason'

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."
Sir John Harrington (1561-1612)

Had the Iraq War been the 'slam dunk" its progenitors predicted, the minor matter of a forged bill of goods would probably not have come up for 50 years, when historians might have disinterred it. But it didn't happen that way.

I've never had particularly warm feelings towards either President Bush or his Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney spooked me early - as soon as I discovered that having been tasked to find a Vice Presidential running mate for George Bush, he selected himself.

Later, when his wife disclosed some of his personal predilections, he spooked me even more. It had been her husband's habit, Mrs Cheney said, to baby-sit his infant daughters by taking them with him to view Civil War battlefields.

To me, the story suggested a racist bitter-ender, obsessing about what might have been had Robert E Lee been more successful.

Fanciful? Perhaps, but the behaviour of Cheney and the rest of the Bush administration since has given me no cause to revise my speculation. They have emphasised their racist agenda in many ways, from Affirmative Action to Katrina, from Haiti to Darfur - and of course, above all, in Iraq.

And the main architect has been Mr Cheney.

So, although like every other Cassandra in the world I hate saying 'I told you so', it was not without some satisfaction that I watch the howling winds of Hurricane Patrick approaching Washington as I write, while the greedy and the powerful, the mighty and the unscrupulous, sit quivering and agonising about the wrath to come.