The real question is this: did Senator John Kerry, now the front-runner in the race to be the Democratic candidate for president since his resounding victories in five primaries last Tuesday, use Botox to improve his looks? In earlier primary debates, the face of the 60-year-old Kerry certainly seemed pitted with worry wrinkles that I suspect were a turn-off to many viewers. But when it came to the more recent debate in South Carolina, his brow was miraculously smooth as he smiled away like a character in a toothpaste ad. Previously, he had looked like a sad basset hound. But suddenly here was a new, winning John Kerry, who certainly seemed like the beneficiary of Botox (Botulinum Toxin Type A), a cosmetic enhancement fluid, presumably injected into his forehead to rid him of his permanent frown. And then he started to zoom up the polls.
In such trifling matters, I believe, elections here are won or lost. The astonishing but sadly merited meltdown of Howard Dean came after he screeched hysterically at an audience; the 50-year-old Senator John Edwards, the second victor last Tuesday, is a handsome, baby-faced but tough former trial lawyer who looks decades younger than Kerry and speaks a lot about his humble background. He is invariably bright and smiley on the election trail, refusing to attack Democratic rivals and painting a sunny vision of what his America would be like; especially after his victory in his native South Carolina, his adoring fans continue to cheer him on. But it was the basset hound who became a lean and hungry greyhound last Tuesday night - and, as a result, Kerry is now well on his way to becoming the Democratic candidate who will fight Boy George for the presidency in November. They're off!
Just a month ago, Kerry's ratings were in single digits while Dean looked unbeatable. Dean quickly went through almost $35m that he had raised mostly through the internet; Kerry changed his campaign team and his looks. Now, according to a CNN poll published on 3 February, Kerry would beat Boy George by 53 per cent to 46 - and Edwards would beat Bush by one point. Boy George certainly has his work cut out and suddenly (because of Botox?) Kerry, like Edwards, looks a winner. Kerry has to negotiate Super Tuesday on 2 March, when the two most populous states in the country - California and New York - go to the polls, and then the nomination looks to be his. With Edwards as his running mate, representing his native and all-important South?
Kerry is a well-off product of New England - Republicans like to paint his state of Massachusetts as a bastion of left-wing looniness - who is married to Teresa Heinz Kerry who, as a result of her upbringing in Mozambique, speaks distinctly accented English. Her first husband, Senator John Heinz (of the baked beans dynasty), was killed in a plane crash in 1991 and she became hugely rich as a result - a significant factor in this year's elections. Kerry himself was a member of the secretive but socially influential Skull and Bones society at Yale - just like Boy George and his dad were. Who said America is not run by rich and powerful networks?
But the 3 February primaries - in Arizona, Missouri, South Carolina, Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota and Delaware - have taken the eye of the media away from Washington. That is a pity, because remarkable things have been happening here. Somebody in Washington has been telling the truth! A senior government figure has finally told the truth about WMDs, dodgy intelligence and Iraq. In doing so, David Kay, the chief weapons inspector for the US in Iraq until he resigned a fortnight ago, set Washington alight.
Whatever the spin put on Kay's remarks by Tony Blair and others, his words have been unequivocal: "We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here . . . if you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly cannot have a policy of pre-emption." That's just one of the things he has typically been saying. Nothing very equivocal in that. The bespectacled, moustachioed Kay had a staff of no fewer than 1,600 helping him in his fruitless search for WMDs, and he is certainly no wimpy lefty, either: he is a firm supporter of the Bush administration and was a financial contributor to Boy George's campaign as well as to other Republican causes.
Yet so far, the issue of the non-existent WMDs remains largely an inside-the-beltway scandal, causing nothing like the ructions that have happened across Britain. True, in a Gallup poll released on 2 February, more Americans opposed the war than supported it (by 51 per cent to 49); but the absence of WMDs has never really taken off as a major issue for most Americans.
I certainly do not see Dubbya being brought down by the war alone. It is true that Kerry can claim true battlefield experience and bravery medals from his military service in Vietnam, while Bush was apparently going AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. (This is a rumour that has hordes of hacks trying to prove that Boy George was actually a deserter from the cushy posting that his then-congressman father wangled for him: now that, if proved, might take off.) But Boy George's advisers have seen to it that the WMDs inquiry in the US will not report until mid-2005 at the earliest, well after the 2 November election.
The inquiry's conclusions, too, are likely to be smotheringly woolly: as with its British counterpart, the inquiry will not look at the sexing-up of intelligence by politicians, but will examine only why the intelligence was wrong. It will also embrace Iran, North Korea and Libya - thus helping to cloud the issue of what went wrong over Iraq in particular. It will conclude, naturally, that there was an intelligence failure - nicely setting up the CIA and its Clinton-appointed director, George Tenet, for the knife. I will bet my bottom dollar that Tenet will not survive the publication of its report - and he may well go earlier.
As for Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, he is an experienced infighter who is no stranger to what I have described as the CYA (cover your ass) game in Washington. His camp is putting it about that in October 2002, his department said it could not find a "compelling case" that Iraq was developing WMDs - something that was not revealed in the run-up to the invasion and about which Powell, ever the loyal soldier, kept quiet. It is also being leaked that Powell was presented by the Bush administration with a dossier including 45 dodgy pages on WMDs, 38 on Iraq's alleged links with terrorism and 16 on human rights violations; but Powell in effect tore up the dossier and went with what he thought was more reliable intelligence from more conventional sources.
Even as he was trying to justify the war to the UN in February last year, members of the congressional intelligence committees were being secretly briefed about what was a smoking gun, if true: that Saddam Hussein possessed at least one unmanned plane that could deliver chemical or biological weapons over long distances. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, in particular, was a behind-the-scenes propagator of this one - but Powell was not satisfied and refused to repeat it to the UN. Kay's men later located the plane; it is equipped only to take photographs.
The White House claims that everyone - including the intelligence services of Germany, Israel, Russia, China and France, as well as those of the US and UK - believed that Saddam had WMDs. Whether this is true or not, it is clear that the Bush administration hugely sexed up the "beliefs" of the CIA and others - I think "belief" is a better and more accurate word than intelligence, in this case - until utterly lurid stories went round the world and into more intelligence files, and so it snowballed on. "There are caveats that clearly dropped out as you moved higher and people read the headline summaries," says Kay. "I think this is something that needs to be investigated and looked at." Which, you can be certain, it won't be.
We meanwhile have it on the word of Paul O'Neill, Bush's former treasury secretary, that the Bush administration started planning to remove Saddam from power just days after taking office. Under a man called Douglas Feith, the Office of Special Plans was speedily set up in the Pentagon by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy. Feith, like Wolfowitz and Cheney, had advocated overthrowing Saddam throughout the 1990s; such is his ardour that he has been called "Wolfowitz's Wolfowitz". His job was to collect intelligence on Iraq which would render an invasion justifiable.
In this way, a tiny, politically motivated intelligence unit in effect pre-empted the mighty CIA and the Pentagon's rou-tine intelligence channels. It cherry-picked the intelligence it wanted - and this was the intelligence that the Bush administration used.
Feith and his chums gave much credence to the so-called Iraqi National Council and its leader, the highly suspect Ahmed Chalabi, who had not been to Iraq since the 1950s and was a shady businessman living in the US. The Office of Special Plans and Chalabi got into a symbiotic relationship, with Chalabi telling Feith's would-be spooks what they wanted to hear so that he could become the putative leader of Iraq; and giving Feith, Wolfowitz et al multiple reasons why regime change in Iraq was imperative. Chalabi's reassurances over how American troops would be welcomed into a country he no longer knew explain why the US found itself in a quagmire rather than being welcomed with garlands of flowers.
By appointing an inquiry that will not report until next year, the Bush administration has - successfully, I suspect - brushed the issue of the non-existent WMDs under the carpet here. Kerry, if and when he is confirmed as the Democratic candidate, will certainly try to contrast his real experience of war with Bush's vicarious one: I can see delicious ads featuring Boy George dressed up in an airman's outfit and landing on the USS Lincoln on 2 May 2003, to proclaim the end of hostilities in Iraq in front of a sign that said "Mission Accomplished". Cut to footage of John Kerry dressed in battlefield fatigues in Vietnam, where he was wounded three times and was decorated for bravery. The difference between the two would be stark indeed - but Bush so far has played the patriot card very well.
If the US inquiry were genuinely meant to unearth intelligence failures, however, it would be asking deeper questions about what has gone wrong in the past 15 years. The CIA and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, a supposed expert on the Soviet Union, failed to see perestroika coming. The CIA failed to foresee the original bombing of the World Trade Center by al-Qaeda in 1993; nor did it forecast the attempted assassination of the former President Bush in Kuwait the same year (which led Bill Clinton to unleash 28 Tomahawk cruise missiles on Baghdad). The suicide bombing by al-Qaeda of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, when 17 lives were lost, simply left the CIA mystified. No predictive intelligence had come in, it would appear.
We are unlikely to learn any more about why all this happened - in 2005 or any other time. Unless, that is, President Kerry and Vice-President Edwards decide otherwise early next year: an interesting prospect - but then, they are Washington insiders just like the rest.
In any event, watch this space - for news of Botox enhancements and everything else that you ever wanted to know about this year's presidential elections.
