That I, unmurdered in my bed,
And Mrs Gabb, unravished,
May count forever on the care
Of Mr Bush and Tony Blair,
Let us give praise to him whose eyes
Have spied for truth among the lies.
Timothy Starr, to thee I sing -
Whose name shall through all ages ring
For statements based on evidence,
And sometimes too on common sense.
Thou from the first wast quite assured
Mesopotamia's tyrant lord
Had—God knows how, though without right -
Weapons of vast and horrid might,
To use against us in attack,
Or hand around outside Iraq.
Yes, others doubted; others sneered;
Others maintain that none appeared.
But thou, O Timmy, thou cheered on
Those brave, brave men in Washington
To do their duty of defence
Regardless of intelligence.
So Iraq we liberated,
While Dick Cheney's partners waited,
And children there did we compel
To arms or sorrows bid farewell.
Some their monument seek in stone:
Be thine in Baghdad blood and bone.
If it decay, as must all flesh,
There will be minds to keep it fresh.
Therefore, indebted for the care
So lavished from thine office chair,
These verses on our happy state
To thee, O Tim, I dedicate.

I wrote the above lines earlier this month, as part of my continuing debate on the Libertarian-Alliance-Forum—a Yahoo Group - with Tim Starr. This is a noisy, crowded discussion place, where few limits are placed on debate. One of the running debates—not surprisingly, bearing in mind how it divides the whole libertarian movement—is on the war with Iraq. Tim believes passionately in the rightness of that war, and in the basic truth of the intelligence on which its justification rests. I, of course, dispute the whole case. I was moved to verse when I grew bored with arguing over the facts. The verses are deliberately cruel, and it is a severe test of Tim's basically kind nature that he can bring himself even to speak to me again. However, poetic invective has an established place in at least the English political tradition. I cannot hope to compete with Dryden, Swift and Pope and the other great masters of this tradition. Indeed, it was my intention to publish on the LA Forum and the let the piece rest in the archive. But I have been persuaded by some of my fans to publish it in a more accessible medium. And so, if any should think ill of me on account of these verses, blame my nation's political culture—or my own lack thereof.

For those who care about such things, the poem is in rhymed iambic tetrameter, with frequent trochaic substitution in the first foot of each verse. The natural tendency of such lines to diaeresis between the second and third foot is checked in several couplets by a word bridge and by a caesura within the second or third foot. The purpose of these variations is to avoid monotony. The primary model, not surprisingly, is Alexander Pope—though his own preferred form was the heroic couplet—and there are traces of Milton and A.E. Housman.