Leading Article: Smoke and bangs

NOTHING, it seems, excites British journalists so much as war and the prospect of war. The evidence was there again last week. 'Dambusters return to tame Saddam,' shrieked the front page of London's Evening Standard. 'Saddam lies low as the Tornados go in,' roared the Daily Telegraph. Nor was television any calmer or more detached. Jet fighters on the runway, pilots giving the thumbs up, missiles being loaded - these are the pictures television loves, with a terse commentary to match. It might have been Ernest Hemingway who counted them all out, and counted them all in.

Partly this is because news journalists and the editors who manage them tend to be men rather than women, and men (or the boys inside them) often have a covert enthusiasm for machinery, smoke and bangs, which (like boys) they can somehow dissociate from the death and destruction they are intended to achieve. But, in Britain, there is also something else. It does not take a very sceptical frame of mind to decide that all that was going on, or taking off, last week was Britain's small, six-aircraft contribution to President Bush's re-election campaign. But scepticism seems to have taken a holiday these days.

This may be an old and tired country but it refuses to disentangle itself from the romance of its military history. We should ask more questions when men climb into aircraft with serious intentions, or when politicians make noises about other people's wars. As our reports today (pages one and two) on the trade in British arms to Iran demonstrate, the levels of dissembly and humbug (sometimes called pragmatism) can be truly enormous.