I am sick unto death of the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and its abbreviation, "WMD" - so much so that I all but had to force myself to type them just now. I am also sick of the shrillness and stridency with which the subject is "discussed" in CE and OT. So I'm going to say what I think here, once, and be done with it.

I hate the idea that the government of the US lied intentionally in order to have a war. I don't want to believe it, I resist concluding it. And notice I said "the government" - there's a huge number of people involved at all levels, any one of whom could have beans to spill, and I think by now somebody would have.

So I don't buy the "Big Lie" stand.

But what does that leave? Two governments, the United States and Great Britain, changed the priorities of their multi-tiered claims of justifying the invasion depending on the day and the questioner at the news conference. However, enough statements were recorded, and have been gathered and reprinted in a group since, to illustrate that disarmament was at least as important as 'regieme change' a.k.a. 'liberation' in their minds. They based their tactics in the UN on the weapons, and on the inefficacy of the UN inspectors to find them.

Now, nobody's finding them. One thing that says - hard to argue against - is that the UN inspectors probably wouldn't have found any. What it doesn't say is why nobody's finding them. It seems, depending on which you'd rather believe, that either there never were any (not in the quantities claimed, anyway), or there were, but were destroyed during the buildup and the invasion itself. There's even an outside chance that the 'weapons' were faked by the scientists to fool Saddam while sabotaging him. But nobody's finding remains of destroyed weapons, either real ones or dummies - not that I've heard, but I freely confess to be avoiding the topic on the news.

The "Big Lie" faction says it means there never were any weapons, and the US and UK made the whole thing up to 'justify' invading a sovereign nation for some other unstated reason(s) - opinions vary on what those might be. The "Big Excuse" faction says not to worry, we told you they'd be hard to find and they'll turn up, real soon now.... The "Big Deal" faction says the ends justify the means, 'liberation' was the real deal all along, and so what if we don't find weapons?

Or... maybe weapons are being found, and nobody's saying. Again, that's a huge number of people with perfectly tight lips. Pardon me if I don't find it plausible; neither do I find plausible, in the face of the attention being paid to this very issue, that anything found would be withheld from the public for so long. One might think the US and UK would be proud to say "See, we were right all along!"

I see one more possibility in the midst of this screaming match: the "Big Oops". Signal intelligence was misinterpreted and/or mistakenly exaggerated in importance; human intelligence was lacking and/or deliberate misinformation. In other words, the US/UK governments initiated the invasion with full confidence in their reasoning, not knowing at the time that it was 'vaporware'.

I'm refusing to join any faction, and I've backed away from the screaming match. I may lurk those threads, but chances are I won't post in them - no great loss. I will say this: the lives taken and the billions spent call for an accounting. Thank God for John Adams, chief advocate in his day for the "checks and balances" of the federal government.

One more note - an ironic one, of course. It's very revealing to me how many of the regulars (some of them the Founders of the Zone, if you will) have been exhibiting the faith of True Believers, no less than the anomalists and other purveyors of pseudoscience we all came here to escape, and who we all enjoy decrying. Have none of you considered that the reasoning behind the phrase "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence" applies to the stands you're taking - no matter which one?