GEORGE Bush and Tony Blair are said to be the only two world leaders who keep a copy of the Bible in their bedrooms. For some reason this unsettling detail brings to mind a troubling little scenario.

Bush, having invited Blair over to the United States for a spot of unilateral ear-bending, suggests a bout of reference swapping, so that each of them can relate their favourite parts of the Bible. But George never moves beyond the "vengeance is mine" bit and Tony doesn't get his turn.

George Bush is probably the most powerful man in the world. That alone is enough to keep you awake at night. The fact that he, along with his pliable pal Tony Blair, likes to seek "'political sustenance" from the scriptures only adds to the foreboding.

This is not to disparage those who turn to the Bible for comfort. Heaven knows, as it were, we all need an escape, it's just that some of us find it in whodunits and never-completed crosswords.

The Bible, like patriotism, can be the last refuge of the scoundrel. It is a very large book and contains many phrases which can be bent to almost any purpose you may care to mention. Just the work of reference for an American president with a one-track mind (or a one-attack mind, perhaps).

Much has been written about the anniversary of September 11, so I won't add to that pile of sorrowful words.

Instead, it is worth wondering how we got from the terrorist atrocity of a year ago to what now seems like an inescapable war against Iraq.

Because Iraq has never been directly linked to what occurred a year ago yesterday, the "there to here" equation is hard to follow. The explanation favoured by President Bush, and echoed by our prime minister, is approximately that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous nut-case who could blow up half the world if only he could get his hands on some nuclear weapons from a car boot sale in the desert. That "approximately" is there for a reason, but you see what I mean.

A dossier published this week by the International Institute of Strategic Studies prompted headlines that Iraq could produce nuclear weapons "within months".

Yet there appears to be little fresh evidence in this report, which allowed those who favour war to extrapolate all the most convenient bits of information and stitch them into an argument.

Saddam Hussein is known to be a tyrant today, as he was a year ago, and ten years before that. He fought a long and pointless war against Iran, invaded Kuwait, fired missiles at Israel and used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds. All this is appallingly true - yet what has changed now to legitimise a war?

Tony Blair's argument, put with his usual mix of moral outrage and brittle exasperation, is that "we cannot do nothing" with the world's worst-behaved tyrant. Instead, he believes that: "We should so everything we can to stop him using the weapons he has and getting the weapons he wants."

Yet sceptics in the audience are growing impatient with this assertion, and are now shifting about in the uncomfortable suspicion that they've heard all this before and need something incontrovertible.

The "new evidence" darkly suggested by US Vice-president Dick Cheney seems little more than further convenient suspicion.

The argument for war will have to be put better than this.

At the moment it's hard not to conclude that George Bush, casting about for a suitable enemy, has turned to one his father made earlier. Sons sometimes struggle to live up to their fathers - and Bush the younger seems to want to fight another Gulf War, to finish off what his father left undone.

Updated: 10:44 Thursday, September 12, 2002