The bottom line for Bush is the advice of Karl Rove - who is surely suggesting Bush first let the left and the other nations hang themselves on the impressions being cast that we have been unsuccessful in the quest for WMD.

Trust me...if none had been confiscated, Daschle and the folks with connections to leakers inside the CIA and Pentagon would be all over Bush seeking an issue to clobber Bush with for 2004.



Dangerous speculation, politically and morally. I read it this way: a lot of people died because a few people lied to get GWB eight years instead of four, to prove... what? That it could be done? That Sonny's cojones are bigger than Daddy's? That some ancient Chinese predecessor to Machiavelli revealed the One True Way of governance?

Review:

- The ambiguously elected president and his administration demanded to the world that disarmament was sufficient cause to violate national sovereignty, while refusing to substantiate the claim that weapons existed with any more than increased volume. In layman's terms, "Evidence? We dont have to show no steeenking evidence!"

- When pressed, they trotted out a handful of satellite photos and interpreted them in ways that would make an anomalist proud, in spite of the fact that the photos themselves showed far less, for all their technological sophistication, than those grainy B&W shots of Cuba 40 years ago.

- Right on up to the week of the invasion, disarmament was still the front line of justification, even though "liberation" was noticeably being brought up as a fallback. And just in time, too.

Now - so far - no arms have been found of the kind we were so thoroughly indoctrinated to fear being used against us. And you, in your private mythical spookworld, have decided that if any were found, the knowledge thereof would be hidden in some leakproof inner sanctum of the intelligence networks. Why?

Why, to defeat domestic political opponents, of course! Sooo much more useful than bringing said weapons out in the open, subject to independent verification, and then be able to say forthrightly, "See, we were right all along!" It's much better to perpetuate the global mind-game for its own sake.

What you've done, essentially, is hand the more conspiracist-minded on my side of the table the last excuse they need to scream "Wag the Dog!". Did you really mean to do that, or are you so wrapped up in Byzantine dreams that you didn't see it? If you're actually right, "Bush's diamond", as you style it, is a doggie diamond.

Fittingly for the King of Vortices, you've provided the Ultimate Spin, the full 360 of circular reasoning, and the kind of thing conspiracists dream of.