Curveballs have a spin added in order to cause the path of the ball to behave undexpectedly.

Spin was not recently invented, nor were cons, disinformation, faking, etc..

It is easy to discern the obvious first order effects but this is far deeper than that. The United States has been spun out of control. Iraq was a first order target to lure the defense war industry and it's backers. The second order target was this country. Con men and psychopaths are rather easy to con and manipulate once you understand their motives and what they want to hear since they are fairly two-dimensional.

They still don't understand.

Who won the war?

We didn't.

The Sunnis didn't.

Who own's the debt?

Who supplies Iran?

Who wins no matter what happens?

The people in the State Department are probably too stupid to answer this question, or they know well enough to keep quiet lest they be fired.

"The Art of War" was written a long time ago. Apparently no one in the government has ever heard of it. I guess the brass in the pentagon hve heard of it, but it is doubtful that they could grasp it if they read it. Sure they can play a number on the Shia and the Sunni, but they cannot imagine that the same is being done to them.

Toys don't win wars, brains do.

Don't worry about the curveballs, the screwballs are a far greater problem. Too bad that it is too late to do anything about it.

With apologies to Salon's readers who don't get the baseball analogy, every pitcher, catcher or hitter who has ever aspired to the big time knows that you'll never make it to the major leagues if you can't handle the Curveball.

I don't think I have ever thought that Bush or Cheney or any other high muckity muck actually intentionally lied about the whole business. What I do believe is that those high muckity mucks had the goal of raw with Iraq from the time they started campaigning, in Bush's case maybe because he wanted to finish daddy's war, or avenge the insult to daddy's honor, or to show daddy that he was all grown up. The reasons don't matter. What matters is that he had that goal, Cheney pushed the right buttons to make that goal the top priority, and the flunkies at the next step down got the message loud and clear: justify war. Find a reason. Discover what Saddam is really up to. And when their underlings got the word, the shivered and passed it on down in more explicit terms. It's like that old story about the engineers who proclaim some new plan as shit that stinks something fierce, and the word passes uphill until the managers hear (and pass on) that it is fertilizer and it is powerful. In this case, the word changed until it got to the bottom, where they just did what they thought was wanted.

No, it's not exactly lying. But it is dishonest, and nobody in that position of power should have that kind of blinders on, or hire only staff who have not an iota of independence.

Very interesting review. If Curveball provided the information to the CIA in order to further a personal adjenda or felt compelled to because emotional and psychological considerations individuals must have had their own motives for accepting it.

My feeling has been that the role of Bernard Lewis in selling the war has never been explored. He made the acceptance of the actions of the administration much more understandable and logical to a segment of the population that values academia and critical thought. I don't know how his relationships and contacts coordinated his book and public appearances at just the right time.

These mistakes in decision making and policy - and in this case a bold, and in my estimation mistaken, call to action - are so much easier when an agency staff is in charge and unchallenged by people more dependent on election.

Beth Curtis

The Downing Street Memo is a record of British intelligence given to Prime Minister Tony Blair before the Iraq War. The memo made the case that the "facts" about WMDs in Iraq were being manipulated by the Americans to support a pre-existing policy of overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

The only intelligible interpretation of Blair's subsequent actions is that Blair agreed with the pre-9/11 Bush/Cheney plan to use good-old-fashioned brute-force imperialism to strategically realign the Middle-East for the purpose of securing its oil resources.

Newsflash #1: Political asylum seekers lie and embellish in order to get asylum. See Ayaan Hirsi Ali for example. Their choice is to lie or be denied asylum.

Newsflash #2: Political dissidents and exiles lie and exaggerate in order to enlist the help of powerful countries and sway political opinion in their favor. Tin-pot dictators only pose a threat to that segment within their civilian population that opposes them but you won't get anywhere telling the truth. Much better to portray them as an existential threat to the entire planet. As a bonus it makes you look like a great hero for opposing them.

Newsflash #3: UN inspectors were in Iraq following up on the leads provided by Curveball and company. Not a single lead panned out! You don't need to be an intelligence officer with years of training to figure out that you're dealing with an unreliable source or worse a plant or a double-agent (a plant or a double-agent would have provided some good info to protect their credibility). Even Dubya should have figured that one out. Of course he and his administration didn't want to know the truth because it would have deprived them of their casus belli. The American media and the American public can't see the forest for the trees. They are so involved in the minutiae of how knew what when and who fed what dis-information to whom that they forget this simple and obvious fact.

We went to war with Iraq based on the tiniest piece of unsubstantiated intelligence from an Iraqi defector, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars.

Yet we can't spend a fragment of that money to address our energy problems and global warming because "the evidence isn't in yet."

America, where have you gone?