It's official - in the words of Gabriel Byrne, from The Usual Suspects, "there is no coke on this boat."

We have given up looking for WMDs in Iraq. If they were ever there - and it looks like they never really were at all - they're not there now.

The Bush Administration is doing a little more shifting of the goalposts, as expected. The election's results - slim as they were - reconfirmed America's support of Bush's policy towards Iraq, and what we did.

There are no regrets, except that maybe the President thinks he shouldn't shoot from the hip so often. (His wife gets on him for this, apparently. Pity about the voters...)

I have to say I know how the President feels, provided that wasn't a toss-off line of Bushit. I wish I'd listened to my wife on this one, too. Because, in the light of the latest big event, I'm looking back at the columns I wrote on Iraq, leading up to the conflict, with a sinking feeling.

I am struck at what I said then, and what I feel now.

What I feel now is regret, but it's regret mixed with a sense of confusion. I keep feeling like we should have done something else, but I don't know what.

Back then, I was crying "enough" and saying Saddam Hussein was a menace that needed to be removed. Now I still say he was a menace - especially to his own people - but wonder if there wasn't something else we could have done, instead.

Back then, I asked if we were willing to gamble our country's security on the continued "good" behavior of Saddam Hussein, and said that I wasn't. Now I'm wondering if we couldn't have just continued the containment, ratcheted things up a bit and...

...

And what?

See, that's the problem I keep coming back to, here. The general statements that I made back then have not been invalidated by the fact that we can't find any WMDs in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein was a bastard, and nothing we've found has contradicted this. Do we really know that, if he'd gotten his hands on some, he wouldn't have used them? Or he wouldn't have given them to someone else to use?

Saddam Hussein was also a warlike bastard. We know he was trying to get WMDs. See the above.

Saddam Hussein killed his own people in droves. The pits of bodies that have been uncovered, after the invasion, are horrific testament to decades of unchecked, murderous behavior. If he'd throw a man feet-first through a woodchipper for telling a rude joke, how do we know he wouldn't authorize a 9/11-style attack on America?

So the arguments I made in favor of the war still stand. Nothing has changed, except the fact that, for all our bleating about the danger Saddam represented to us, a lot of that danger has been shown up for the darkly comic mirage that it was.

See, not only did we think he had them, but he thought he had them too. We were all caught up in a snafu wrought by a pattern of lies, overstatements and outright bullshit his own people had to resort to in order to save their skins.

Back then, I admitted "We're probably being lied to even now." Who ever would have imagined how completely, and by how many different people?

So my arguments still stand... but somehow, in face of things, I just don't think that's good enough.

Would I be singing that tune if this war was going well, as opposed to having degenerated into an utter farce? That I cannot say.

I'd like to think that I would be as embarrassed and shocked to have found no real danger there, post-invasion, with everyone greeting us as good guys instead of shooting at us, as I am now.

But I can't say that for certain.

If this episode has taught me anything - other than to listen to my wife - it's that I can't trust myself to keep a solid opinion for more than a few months at a time. The landscape changes, I lurch to one side or the other, and before I know it I'm 180 degrees around from where I started.

And if there's any saving grace, here - other than the fact that Iraq is free from Saddam Hussein - it's that I mostly refrained from attacking or insulting people who disagreed with me. That was intentional: I was, and still am, sick of people on both sides of the argument spending more time and energy attacking those who disagree with them than explaining why they're right.

But that's like saying I was smiling and being a positive influence while someone else was handing out the cyanide.

I don't know what to say, here. I really don't.

On one hand, Iraq is free. On the other hand, our mismanagement of the war has led to a living hell for those people to take their first, free steps in, no doubt making them dream of another strongman who'll make the trains run on time and the noisemakers go away.

On one hand, we helped break Iraq by supporting, then containing, Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, there had to have been a million better ways to "buy it" than what this has become.

On one hand, we've gotten rid of a tyrant. On the other hand, we've created a fertile recruiting and training ground for hundreds of followers of other, even more dangerous tyrants.

And to top it all off, the song and dance we pushed ahead of all other concerns turned out to be an empty orchestra. Not a WMD to be found.

I feel embarrassed by my support of this war. Even if we wound up doing the right thing - freeing Iraq from a tyrant we used to back - we did it under questionable pretenses for unclear reasons, and this is now coming back to bite us on the ass.

Maybe a slim majority of the American people have reconfirmed the President's decision, but that does not make it the right thing to have done. And maybe he doesn't feel any regrets, but we've had the past four years to discover what an amoral creature he is, so that's hardly any surprise.

I can't go back in time and change what I said. I can't apologize for it. I can't make it all go away.

I can't even get the old me, before I apparently lost my mind, to come back here, now. For all I know, he's gone away to the same place every other version of "me" went, over time: somewhere else, far from here, leaving the now me with memories, regrets and a lot of incriminating evidence to hide.

So all I can do is say that I will never, ever again support a preemptive war.

I don't care if that puts me in with the "September 10thers." Most of the people using that phrase are just as warlike and callous as the tyrants they claim to oppose. The rest are not people I need to be dealing with.

I don't care if that means we may be hip-deep in rubble and casualties, again. Sneak attacks are a fact of life, and aside from prevention there's no way to micromanage the ingenuity of people who want you dead. The best thing we can do is learn from our mistakes and not make new ones.

I don't care what the consequences are. We do not start shooting until they have done something to us worth shooting about. End of story.

That's my promise. That's my story.

Maybe this time I can stick to it.