In embracing him so readily as the acceptable legitimator, Bush's heart may have been too soon made glad.

But if ethics is doing its job well, and not just acting as moral legitimator and research cheerleader, it should be causing trouble.

Blix, he points out, "is a nice, soft-spoken, grandfatherly Swede, not an American, not a warmonger" - the perfect legitimator of the American war effort.

It is a co-ordinating device and a legitimator of subsequent action, but, according to this area of literature, the development of the rational corporate plan is not a dominant decision-making process.

The small but noisy group now casting aspersions on the IAEA head are those who made such a mammoth pigs ear of Iraq - with the exception that Blair has now been replaced by Sarkozy as the token foreign legitimator for Bush & Co.

Part of the overall argument of this book is that, as the Roman catholic church is principal validator or legitimator of the Southern state along with the concept of the national entity, what that state goes on to do in the field of social ethics cannot be separated out from the responsibilities of the church.