If Bush was the lying bastard everyone seems to think he is, cooking CIA evidence and all that, one would think that he would have arranged to have irrefutable evidence planted in Iraq by now--something that would be a piece of cake under the current circumstances. So what's the holdup?

Notwithstanding that it's feeding into your usual misdirection from the topic (again), with nothing else to do on a Saturday night I'm willing to kick this one around...

"Irrefutable" false evidence on a scale of both quantity and type sufficient to substantiate the pre-war claims of Bush and his Stalking Poodle have to be fabricated (in the physical sense, though the pun is noted) and shipped to Iraq, then transported inland to sites not already examined (using black helicopters?), before some GI could be genuinely surprised (or convincingly act surprised from a script) by the discovery. All sneaked past the scrutiny of the free press, American and otherwise, on the ground in Iraq and here at home. Oh, yeah, and it would all have to be made from metric standard stock, too - steel, piping, fittings, the whole nine yards. Not exactly off-the-shelf material.

Basically what you're talking about is a multi-million dollar secret defense contract. Happens all the time, I know, but - start-up costs, mobilization schedules, design and fabrication and shipping all take time. To be effective at all, Operation Wool Over Eyes would have to have started no later than, say, the forward basing to Qatar and Kuwait laughingly "disguised" as training exercises, and probably a lot sooner.

Not bloody likely.
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As long as I'm blowing smoke rings for the fun of it...

You've speculated once or twice, at least, about what you called an "Emperor's New Clothes" scenario in which the Iraqi scientists and administrators fake weapons development to keep themselves and their families alive. It has some plausibility - sounds a lot like the bad old days of the USSR, or some of the last desperate projects of the collapsing Third Reich. So try this one on:

Bush is so hot to trot against Saddam (I will not bother to speculate why - that's up to the shrinks) that he's as deeply convinced about hidden weapons as anomalists are about structures on Mars. Considering the reliance on questionable photo interp, that has a lovely ironic ring to it... Anyway, that puts the intel' guys and gals in the sticky spot of telling the Boss he's wrong - if they could get him to listen, which they all doubt. They "serve at the pleasure of the President", after all - and jobs are scarce outside the Beltway, another hallmark of the Bush Administration. Last thing they want to do is admit, "We don't know."

So they don't gainsay him. Instead, they hope his case will be shot down in the UN; even though they have to give Powell their best stuff for his Powerpoint show, they know it's shaky - they're the experts, after all. Problem is, the Boss is so manic that it's already too late. Screw the UN, screw world opinion, screw a third to a half of domestic opinion, fuck 'em all we're by god goin' in and kickin' ass!

You know what's my biggest problem with that scenario? It's too probable. I hate to think that 49% of the 20% of eligible voters who bothered to vote elected a President who's clinically delusional. On the other hand, it's happened before. Where would civil liberties be if John Dean had stayed quiet and Woodward and Bernstein hadn't gotten a call from Deep Throat?