President Bush instructed his intelligence chiefs to verify the Israeli claims; the disastrous intelligence failure on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was fresh in everyone's mind.
There is also growing frustration at the failure of the weapons states to divest themselves of nuclear weapons.
The President had ordered him, the General said, on the Senator's recommendation and owing to the failure of conventional weapons, to strike the Martians with a nuclear missile.
And crucially, the government has now recognised that there is a link between the failure of the nuclear weapons states to meet their disarmament obligations, under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and an increased likelihood of nuclear proliferation.
One of those flaws was its failure to ban sales of weapons to groups that commit "acts of aggression," ostensibly referring to rebel groups, he said.
Since then, failure of the nuclear weapon states to comply has had predictably disastrous results for global proliferation and nuclear danger, convincing India, Pakistan and North Korea that if they can't cajole the nuclear weapon states to give up nuclear weapons, then they might as well join their nuclear club.
Noting the huge civilian casualties, and the Iraq Survey Group report confirming the failure to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the motion calls on "the British government to recognise that the continuing occupation of Iraq is unjustifiably destructive of both lives and resources, and calls on the prime minister to name an early date for the withdrawal of British forces".
The subsequent failure of the search for weapons of mass destruction, whose existence had been a major justification for the war, may have been a blow to the Administration's credibility (as well as a distraction for troops engaged in the hunt), but it did not seem to affect Rumsfeld's certainty in his own judgment.
So, too, Burns speaks of a "failure to find weapons of mass destruction" (not the finding that there were no weapons) and "the absence of a plan" after the invasion (rather than a planned absence).
In the light of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they also worried that pinpointing targets reliably would be near-impossible.
