Credibility Matters Little to Brits, Americans
As the British re-election campaign was ending, the May 1 Sunday Times of London published a secret U.K. government memorandum discussing a July 23, 2002, meeting between Blair and his top security advisers. The memo said that military action against Iraq "was seen as inevitable" and that Bush wanted to remove Saddam "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," weapons of mass destruction.

According to the Times, the memo said that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

The report was not disavowed by the British government. At the time of the memo, Bush officials were insisting they had no plans to attack Iraq.

I am not surprised at the duplicity. But I am astonished at the acceptance of this deception by voters in the United States and the United Kingdom.

I've seen two U.S. presidents go down the drain -- Lyndon B. Johnson on Vietnam and Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal -- because they were no longer believed. But times change -- and I guess our values do, too.