Kevin Myers: No, no, I don't intend to write about Iraq every day, but yesterday's column on the subject was written before its unfortunate author glimpsed a picture of our fair Bono with President Chirac, just after the singer had been made a Chevalier du Légion d'Honneur.
The sight of the two of them on either side of Paul Hewson's wife Ali (ah, blameless, beautiful) had a strangely emetic effect, and I now keep the picture beside me, lest I ever inadvertently swallow some rat-poison or a lethal toadstool.
No doubt this is partly envy. Bono has an income of millions of dollars a year, and pays little or no tax on it. And I don't blame him one bit. I would do the same if I had the talent. But I haven't, and that's that. However, I'd like to think that I wouldn't then give lectures to governments - to which I'm not paying taxes - on how they should be spending more money on the poor, and cancelling Third World debts, and so on.
When asked about Chirac's policy towards Iraq, he replied: "How can you not be for peace?" - echoing a great many letter-writers to this newspaper. But this is the banal dressed up as piety. Because there is no "peace" in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people have died since the Gulf War because of Saddam's manipulation of UN sanctions - deaths which the feeble-minded or the professional anti-American lobby in the West have, of course, blamed on the US. Many thousands more Iraqis have been tortured and murdered by Saddam's goons.
All irrelevant. Did I not read a report - jubilant, naturally - somewhere that Bono has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? Or was that an especially grisly hallucination caused by consuming a toadstool without the Chirac picture to hand? Still, Bono wouldn't be the worst peace laureate by any means. Le Duc Tho and Menachim Begin, seasoned conscienceless killers both, won the Nobel Peace Prize during a temporary respite in their killing fevers.
(On much the same grounds of behavioural remission, perhaps we will soon hear of the Rosemary West Finishing School for Young Ladies and the Michael Barrymore Life-Saving Awards.)
Of course, the Nobel prizes have always been contaminated by politics, and not just the obvious peace awards: the most absurd prize for literature went to Winston Churchill. He is of interest to us here, because in 1922 he was largely responsible for the creation of the state of Iraq out of the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra; and he was able to do by means of the scandalous Sykes-Piquot treaty of 1916. This secret Anglo-French division of Arab lands was a vile betrayal of the Arab peoples of the region, to whom the British had made promises of self-determination during the Great War.
The provinces of "Mesopotamia" were irreconcilable then; and have remained so ever since, and the construction of Iraq was statecraft at its most brazenly cynical; which should surprise no one who has spent even a few moments contemplating Churchill's almost psychopathic disregard for either the truth or honour. There was, it seemed, no one or nothing he would not betray in his pursuit of power or the vindication of his own ego, as the poor Poles would one day discover.
To be sure, the British, along with the French, were responsible for creating Iraq; but after Saddam Hussein came to power, just about everyone else queued to do business with him, including ourselves. We didn't have arms factories, but we had fields, and we sold Saddam processed grass, otherwise known as beef, with which he fed his army. Lords above, we even broke our own laws to do it.
But only one country was insane and irresponsible enough to sell him plutonium-making technology, and that was France. Having been refused further nuclear assistance by the USSR, which had earlier supplied Iraq with a small reactor, Saddam personally turned to the French prime minister of the day, who, after agreeing to supply him with a large number of Mirage F1 fighters, went on to sell him an Osiris plutonium- producing nuclear plant.
The Iraqis initially Arabised the name into Osirak. But then they changed it to Tammuz, at the request of the French prime minister behind the deal, because the satirical press in France had given the reactor the beguilingly Hiberno-French name O'Chirac.
Yes indeed, the man who sold Saddam Hussein a $3 billion plant for making nuclear bombs was none other than Bono's chum, the then prime minister and future president of France, Jacques Chirac.
(One of the terms of the Franco-Iraqi Nuclear Cooperation Treaty, to which Chirac personally agreed, was that "all persons of Jewish race or Mosaic religion" would be not be allowed to participate in the programme, either in Iraq or in France.)
Admittedly, France wasn't completely alone in its delinquency. Brazil, India, Italy and China also provided Saddam with secondary nuclear fuels. But at least those countries have spared us much sanctimonious rhetoric on how best to disarm him, unlike O'Chirac, who - if the Israelis had not bombed the Iraqi reactors at Tammuz - would have been responsible for equipping a genocidal lunatic with nuclear weapons.
Chirac is a moral grotesque whose inability to know right from wrong in other circumstances would have earned him a prison or a psychopath's cell. Instead, this unprincipled antic is today the acclaimed leader of anti-Americanism in Europe.
Yes, indeed, the more I look at it, the more truly nauseating that picture becomes.