noise to signal

A reasonable question

I was reading this morning's news with an increasing sense of dread and deja vue, particularly this quote from Donald Rumsfeld:

"Of course, they have senior Al Qaeda in Iran, that's a fact ... Iran is one of the countries that is, in our view, assessed as developing a nuclear capability, and that's unfortunate."

To rehash my reductionist argument in the days before we opened up hostilities in Iraq: "We all agree that Mr. Hussein is an evil man. But why this war now?"

The answer, of course, was the Weapons of Mass Destruction argument. Secretary Powell:

“Our conservative estimate is that Iraq has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agents. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets ... We have first-hand descriptions of biological-weapons factories on wheels and rails. We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile, biological-agent factories...”

I won't bore you with any more quotes; you either agree with me, in which case you've heard them, or you don't agree with me, in which case you won't hear them.

This morning I again asked myself, "Self, how can we best poke holes in the veneer of victory? How can we start asking questions to add some intelligent debate to our all-but-inevitable attack of misdirection somewhere else in the Middle East?"

And like a vision, it came to me:

And now I give that to you, in a downloadable version, suitable for printing, copying, cutting, and pasting everywhere. Please do.

I should add, in a sort of painful realist addendum, that in truth I know the answer to the question. I doubt very much whether anyone -- whether the Bush administration or the, what, 80% of the American people who supported the war -- ever believed the "Iraq has WMD" argument, or at least believed that was the reason to go to war. We went to war because, after the tragedy of 9/11, we wanted to kick someone's ass. We wanted to flex our military might, no matter the consequences. Think I'm too cynical? Read on:

Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.

"We were not lying," said one official. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."