As I have explained until my fingers bleed, there is NO ANALOGY between your silly "yeti" scenario and the situation in Iraq.

It is true that we have not found evidence yet that meets your standards, but projecting that to mean that there was no plausible reason to go into Iraq or to believe that Iraq was actively pursuing WMD, is ridiculous.

--Iraq did have WMD programs for many years. They manufactured, and USED them on innocent civilians, both their own and those of other nations. Iraq actively pursued the development and/or acquisition of nuclear weapons, even though the Israelis destroyed their first efforts. This was documented and proved.

--Iraq had a long history of concealment, lies, and misdirection regarding these programs. This has also been documented and proved. The nuclear weapons program revealed after the first Gulf War was a complete shock to U.N. officials who had no idea of its existence, despite an ongoing inspection program prior to the war. Iraq supplied no documentation to show that it had destroyed previously proven stocks of WMD.

--There was sufficient evidence of such programs in 1998 to convince the Clinton administration and many others that Iraq should be attacked and a regime change be forced.

--There was sufficient evidence of such programs during the debate to go to war--just a few months ago--to convince the Congress of the U.S., including many Democrats now bitching about Bush lying or being an idiot, to vote in Bush's favor. Please check this post again. Are they all liars and idiots? Is that plausible? And if you say Bush is and they aren't, how do you justify that statement?

I have documented all this many times here, and can dig up all the links again if necessary.

Like I said before, claiming there are yetis in the woods, even if you can't find them right now, is a totally different matter if, a few months before, there actually were live yetis swarming in the woods, with photos, films, samples, captured animals, and other documentation to prove it.

If I went to your house, that of a person with no known criminal record, and claimed you had stolen gold buried there, and dug up half the yard without finding it, you would rightly think I was an idiot.

If I went to the house of a train robber who had in the past stolen and hidden a lot of gold, and dug up half his yard searching for it, a reasonable person would concede that there might be a good chance the gold could be somewhere in the remaining half, even if I hadn't found it yet. This does not rule out, of course, that he buried it somewhere else. This is what you call "real world thinking."

Your Fair Witness "House is White on This Side" logic isn't enough by itself to make judgments in the real world. There are patterns of behavior, common sense, and previous data to consider as well.

And by the way, I never said anything about a "conspiracy." We have not found all the contraband yet. We haven't found Saddam yet either. By your standards, that would mean he was never there.