And Saddam having the WMD was never a political or military possibility. It was a dramatic possibility. Part of the melodramtic unities required to sell the whole shitstain of a war.

If you ever thought we were gonna find "teh WMD" in Iraq, well, my pretension to compassion makes me feel sorry for you.

But I still think we need to look in Syria for those weapons, or maybe your cognac bottle.

Whoops, I mean a Joint and some carrot juice, I've calmed down and I can make my report to the General>

How, he seems to be asking, could someone as simultaneously stupid and pretntious as meself know there were no weapons (WMD) in Iraq? Why do I reject that possibility as only a bit of dramatics to engage the public?

Well, this is how I came to that conclusion in my 5th grade drop-out mind.

Did you General, notice a huge internal contradiction in the story one which was obvious unless you gave the administration the exact same suspension of disbelief you would use to watch an action movie?

If Saddam had WMD, ready primed and deliverable, in even a fraction of the quantities claimed, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE CREAM OF OUR ARMY DOING THERE, WITH VIRTUALLY NO DEFENSES AGAINST THE WMDS? Did Bush and Cheney, or Rummy send then to Iraq to be slaughtered? Cause if Saddam had the weapons, we made our troops available as targets!

Ergo, mon General, it was a pretty good bet Saddam had nothin, bupkis, right? Do you understand the logic here? Or do you think Bush (or whoever) was thinkin, well, "we will find out if Saddam has WMD by putting the cream of our Army, and its equipmentright in front of them. Sure, they'll all get slaughtered, but it'll prove I'm right about the weapons.

And after that, I'll get a new Army and kick Saddams ass!"

As a dramatic possibility, as a device to provoke suspense, the WMDs were brilliant, but as a real posibility, no. UNLESS BUSH IS EVEN MORE INSANE THEN WE THOUGHT and is willing to sacrifice, literally, thousands of soldiers to peove a point.

For a fourth-grade dropout, it seemed pretty clear to me, but it didn't make much of a scenario.

It'll only end in tears.

Oh, it does, it does. One of the more discouraging things about not being able to stomach virtual violence is that I'm much more horrified at the real thing.

It's a defeciency I'm not proud of, but there it is.

And there is a little more to that train of thought, if I can glorify anything I thought my self and was not fed by the MSM with that name. Being a second-grade dropout an all.

So, if Bush sent the troops over there on a role of the dice, maybe there's weapons and maybe there's not, is that the kind of leadership you want when you have a policy of pre-emptive war? I think not. After all, the penalty for acting on the wrong "scenario" id s bit more severe than, say, misunderestimating your opponents in a softball tournament.

Ya' see, I got this funny idea that "scenarios" are great for trying to figure out which plays you should use in a softball game, or even which stratergeries and tictacs to use in a war game.

But when you are committing soldiers to a war, facts are usually a better alternative, while they don't have the same dramatic impact. Why if we knew Saddam had no WMDs and the loyalty and efficacy (if I may misuse that word- you know, first-grade dropout an all) of the Iraqui Army was in doubt, well that would have made the whole thing that worst of all dramatic failings-booooring!

Yes it was dramatic and exciting! Would our herioc warrior boy and girls get massacred by a cloud of poison gas, or die writhing in agony from biological weapons? Tune in next time for the concluding episode of "On to Baghdad". I'm sure the troops involved apreciated the dramatic tension, and the fact that all the unities of melodrama were respected- the bearded villian, the purported superweapons, the grateful Iraquis.

But if that is what the administration is willing to do- role the dice with a sizeable portion of our military force, then they had no business commanding the army cause they are, to use the clinical term, fuckin crazy

I don't know any way to explain why Americans couldn't come to these common sense conclusions except with the fact that the contexts for the presentation of the War On Iraq came straight out of popular melodrama.

I just wanted to show that the War On Iraq was pretty much exposed as a farce, which admittedly is another kind of drama, by the internal contradictions in its presentation.

That doesn't in any way invalidate for me the amazing amount of information debunking the official lines the com mentors here are able to come up with on such short notice.

As a guy who never made it out of first grade, I stand in awe of their grasp of the facts and ability to marshall them on demand, destroying the arguments of wingnuts and warlovers.

My point is that any person who was not willing to look at the war as a game could quickly see just what an obscene perversion of a "foreign policy" it is. And I think the responses from many war defenders (and yes, to even contend that an invasion of Iraq might be within the realms of a sane policy makes you a war defender. Wars are much harder to stop than start.) show that it is almost impossible for Americans to see the war outside of the contexts of a melodrama.

Maybe because they spend a huge amount of their time absorbing these contexts through television and movies.

If that makes me "intellectually pretentious, so be it. Maybe that's why I never made through kindergarten.