The Binary Circumstance

Jon Carroll writes in the San Francisco Chronicle of where the Burning Bush might be leading us:

Another problem: The threat of the evil Iraq had to be built up because the “new Rome” plan probably would not fly with the voters. Bush couldn’t just say that Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, because there are lots of cruel dictators in the world and it has never been our policy to overthrow them merely because they are cruel. (Indeed, far more often it has been our policy to support them.)

Thus, the very embarrassing “weapons of mass destruction” meme. We had chosen Iraq because it was weak, then pretended it was strong to get public support for the invasion. But now it was revealed that Iraq had not posed a threat to anyone but its own citizens since the first Gulf War.

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The Tooney Bin links to The Washington Post for a report that some Bush Administration officials may have helped siphon more cash to groups with terrorist links:

Pentagon adviser Richard N. Perle, a strong advocate of war against Iraq, spoke last weekend at a charity event that U.S. officials say may have had ties to an alleged terrorist group seeking to topple the Iranian government and backed by Saddam Hussein.

The event, attended by more than 3,000 people Saturday at the Washington Convention Center, generated enough concerns within the administration that officials debated whether they had the legal authority to block the event, U.S. officials said yesterday. FBI agents attended it and, as part of a continuing investigation, the Treasury Department on Monday froze the assets of the event’s prime organizer, the Iranian-American Community of Northern Virginia.

See the post for more reference and details. Very interesting.

Light of Reason links to this column in the Washington Times. Writer Jacob Sullum warns President Bush that his comments against the use of steroids in this SOTU address might come back to haunt him:

Safety was not the only issue the president raised. He also said using performance-enhancing drugs “sends the wrong message: that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character.”
A man who owes so much to inherited wealth and his family’s political connections probably should not broach the topic of “shortcuts to accomplishment.” Not all shortcuts come in pills or capsules.

Ouch!

It’s a thought-provoking and funny article.

David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq has been in the news lately. Instead of stockpiles of WMD, he found evidence widespread corruption, lying and theft:

David Kay, who resigned last week as the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, now says he didn’t find stockpiles of WMD — or evidence of a nuclear program well under way in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — and he blames it on a greatly flawed intelligence system and analysis.

Kay summarizes his conversations with Iraqi scientists:

They describe in Iraq that was really spinning into a vortex of corruption from the very top in which people were lying to Saddam, lying to each other for money; the graft and how much you could get out of the system rather than how much you could produce was a dominant issue.

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