THIS week's announcement that the United States has given up its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq comes as a threadbare admission of something many have suspected for two years.

It serves to remind us all that the US never had legitimate grounds for waging war in Iraq, bombing Baghdad to the point of insanity and precipitating the violence and misery that has followed.

One day the people of Iraq may be better off, but that day seems a long way off.

When the US declared war on Iraq in March 2003, Saddam Hussein no longer had any menacing weapons. Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix said as much, although he did concede the US military build-up was the crowbar which opened Iraq to his inspectors.

Why Saddam obstructed the inspections when he had nothing to hide, nobody has said. Pride, a passion for secrecy, or a strategic bluff?

Secretary of state Colin Powell tried to convince the United Nations on February 5, 2003, that Saddam's weaponry posed a threat sufficient to warrant pre-emptive war.

His strongest evidence was a clutch of mobile laboratories supposedly capable of making chemical weapons but equally capable of running tests for farmers or chemistry lessons for school children.

The professional soldier put a brave face on it, be Powell didn't convince himself or anybody else who was not already a believer. He was never again at home in the Bush cabinet.

President George Bush clearly realised the UN was not going to buy the WMD claims and changed his tack to "regime change" - an ultimatum for war if Saddam and his family did not leave Iraq within 48 hours.

His spin doctors and an acquiescent media had already persuaded most Americans that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qaeda and directly linked to the airliner massacres of September 11, 2001, which was known fiction.

Far more convincing explanations for the war are to be found in a report written before 9/11 by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), which envisages a world-wide "Pax Americana", the permanent US military and economic control of every part of the planet. To this end it proposes huge increases in defence spending and nuclear arms and permanent US bases in Europe and Asia.

This thinking does another lap in the National Security strategy circulated on September 20, 2001 - suddenly attributing the changes in policy to the 9/11 attacks.

But we know that is fiction because the plan is in the PNAC document, hatched before al-Qaeda flew.

None of this is either offensive or stupid to those who take the view that the world can only benefit from a US imposed peace and an American empire.

Not all the results of empire are necessarily dreadful.

On the violent evidence of Iraq, however, imposing peace on an unwilling world is not ever going to go the way the authors of PNAC had in their greedy minds.

People freed from despots seldom become instant democrats. Presidents caught in the most outrageous misjudgments seldom resign.