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• Thursday, December 4, 2008 03:59 AM

  War Games, Mind Games

  The US used to buy up Cold War materiel on the sly and then plant it in countries we wanted an excuse to meddle with, and then point to that materiel "discovered" by the CIA and go "AHA! Communist subversion and infiltration!!" and then use that to justify covert (and/or overt) operations against those countries. Mendacious policymaking at its finest.

  I well and truly expected the Bush League to fake WMDs for Hussein's regime, to "unearth" WMDs with Arab stenciling across them, for that "AHA!" moment. But I guess the ginned-up accusations regarding Hussein wouldn't allow that kind of risky political maneuvering, or maybe it wasn't necessary -- GW Bush squandered the world's goodwill in the wake of 9/11 for his war in Iraq.

  What GW Bush did was very nearly as bad, and as mendacious, as the old war materiel shell game. And to hear him lamenting intelligence failures, one can only wonder what he really means by that, since all the intelligence agencies failed to do was find what wasn't there in the first place. It makes me wonder what GW Bush would've thought an intelligence "success" should've been, since he and his cronies were hell-bent on invading Iraq. The message from his administration was unambiguous to the intelligence agencies: find a reason to invade Iraq.

  Mission accomplished.

  —Slackie Onassis Read Slackie Onassis's other letters
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