President Thabo Mbeki all but ignored the twin crises of Aids and lawlessness in Zimbabwe when he opened the Cape Town parliament yesterday with an offer to send South African nuclear weapons experts to Baghdad to avert an attack on Iraq. During the apartheid years, South Africa developed a clandestine nuclear weapons capability which it later voluntarily relinquished with a deactivation programme regarded as a model of how a nuclear power can dismantle its systems. The intervention offer was accepted by Iraq when a South African delegation visited Baghdad last weekend. While the offer is unlikely to have any long-term...