The same question came up with yesterday's news about the aluminum tubes, allegedly for uranium enrichment, that turned out to be a standard size for Iraqi missiles and useless for enrichment. Maybe somebody saw A and said Z because he knew the desired answer; maybe Cheney told Dubya what the rebuild-the-Middle-East party wanted Dubya to hear; but it could just as well be like the evaluation joke that's been floating around for a few years (summarized):
engineer: This is a crock of shit.
middle manager: This is strong-smelling fertilizer.
marketing VP: This strong new product will enrich our company's position in the market!

The game "telephone" is funny in grade school; in history, it \might/ be comedy the third time around.

We know what we gave them during the 1980s.
We know what's been logged as destroyed.

Subtracting line two from line one yields what's still there waiting to be found.

"TRUTH, JUSTICE, FREEDOM, & REASONABLY PRICED LOVE"

?

Not that I'd expect there to be one, just that it would have been cool. (It's a motto from The Glorious People's Republic Of Treacle Mine Road in Terry Pratchett's latest)

I think it is quite clear that Saddam wants nukes and that the only real justification for the war is that Bush and the Likudniks are determined that he shall not have them. So this war is being fought to prevent him from ever making any. Tht might be a popular cause, if it were genuinely internationalist. If the war were sold as an attempt to make things like the nuclear non-proliferation treaties binding, Europe would, I'm sure, sign up. But that would be a war for real treaties, binding on all their signatories, including Mr Bush. Kyoto, anyone? ICC?

In accordance with the 'history repeats as farce', I've seen articles stating that Rumsfield recently set up his own team B in the Pentagon , to produce intelligence analyses that favor his position.

These articles didn't mention if there were ex-Arthur Anderson accountants involved, but I'm sure that they're available.

And that sort of work would be right up their alley.

Note that this doesn't mean you're wrong about Bush wanting the war because he just wants it. I just have my doubts about the CIA's status as a subsidiary of the Bush family.

BTW, although I don't have any links on hand, I don't think the CIA was much more useful for the Clintons either....

My point, if I have one, is that looking to Bush to understand the motive for this war is probably looking in the wrong place. Sure, he wants to do it, but I suspect that his motive is not what ultimately matters.

John: I'm being dim this morning. Do you think anyone has proven a link between the secular Baathists and the religious fanatics of Al Qaida, or should "proven" have been in quotes in your comment? Bush has been claiming this for a while now, with no evidence I can recall seeing. (Of course, with Ari Fleischer telling us two days ago that the President is supposed to know more than citizens, who expects to see evidence?)

My point was to question the CIA's supposed subservience to the Bushies, not so much to affirm proof of the connection. Nevertheless, as far as proof goes, I can't answer for anyone else, but I sure find Safire convincing:

The Kurds induced the captives and some defectors to reveal that the Ansar cell of Al Qaeda had begun producing poisonous chemicals for export. One product was reported here to be a cyanide cream being smuggled through Turkey. The operation was set up by a man with a limp, the informants said, a key bin Laden lieutenant, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi. ( I misspelled that name a few weeks ago.)

The C.I.A. continued to pooh-pooh any connection between Ansar and Saddam. But reporter Jeff Goldberg of The New Yorker and more recently C. J. Chivers of The Times went into Iraq and interviewed some of the captured terrorists. Such reporting eroded the "no clear link" line put out by opponents of action against Saddam.

...

On Oct. 8 of last year President Bush made public a little more of what we learned. "Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq," he told a Cincinnati audience. "These include one very senior Al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks."

That was Zarqawi. Long sought in Jordan for terrorist attacks (most recently the assassination of the U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman), he joined bin Laden in Afghanistan. After the Taliban defeat, Zarqawi slipped out of that country through Iran and made his way to a Baghdad hospital, where his injured leg was treated or amputated, certainly with the knowledge of Saddam's mukhabarat secret police. He was then dispatched to Al Qaeda's Ansar cell in Iraqi Kurdistan, reported the captives who worked with him in the mountains, to create the terrorist poison laboratory.

British intelligence believes the limping terrorist took one of his products, ricin, to Algerian contacts in Turkey. This is a poison that can be delivered in warheads and one well known to Iraqi chemists, who cannot speak to U.N. inspectors. Two weeks ago, a British detective, Stephen Oake, was killed arresting Algerians suspected of making ricin in North London.

American "counterterrorism officials" are still in angry denial about the pattern they refused to see that connects Qaeda terrorists in hiding with Iraqi terrorists in power.

I will not argue with anyone here who thinks the CIA has its head up its ass.

Andrews: "But that would be a war for real treaties, binding on all their signatories, including Mr Bush. Kyoto, anyone? ICC?"

Way it works here, a treaty is binding after ratification by the Senate. That don't happen, the US ain't a party. If I had more free time, I'd use it to thank god the Senate never ratified the two you mention, but that's not the point. The point is that treaties bind those who freely enter into them and we have not, by law, entered.

Certainly "career spook" is a vast exaggeration. On that level, Ronald Reagan was an FBI agent. Bush was never a regular CIA employee, and it would've been pretty impressive for him to maintain a whole secret life as a spy while serving in Congress, ambassador to the UN and China (where his subordinates would be in a much better position to spy), and then parachuted in as a political appointment as DCI for about a year.

Maybe the CIA and the Bush clan are really tight, but if so it's not because Dad was "a career spook." Or maybe the intelligence agencies would happily manufacture evidence for any president, or at least any president they liked.

Simon, Jim Henley, you're right; I ought not call him a career spook. I do continue to wonder who cleaned up so effectively and consistently after Dubya's youthful indiscretions, and who owes whom for doing it.

And I have to say that the events surrounding Fortunate Son struck me as extremely odd, and still do. At the time, I couldn't put my finger on any one thing, but it felt like the pacing was off; like the initial response to the book was too big and too fast-moving, and sorted itself out far too quickly. The story was born full-grown. There wasn't enough of the kind of alongside circumstance, accident, and awkward bits you normally see in a story that's still pulling itself into shape. And when did journalists start accepting it as gospel that what an ex-convict says is untrue, without even checking?

Mr. Hatfield's panicked flight was also peculiar. I'd be the last to put a limit on what a writer might do. But usually, when their books are questioned or attacked, their impulse is to reply. Look how many of them respond to bad reviews, which they know perfectly well is a bad move. And defensiveness and over-long attention spans are practically the identifying marks of auctorial sockpuppets in online discussions.

Hatfield had written an arguable book, one that could be attacked and defended on the strength of its individual sections. I could more easily have seen him taking off if the book he'd written had been a fraud from start to finish, like (say) a forged diary. But he hadn't. It was defensible, but he didn't defend it.

I also found it passing strange that an author, at that moment, would run off to a motel where he wouldn't get his reviews, mail, e-mail, news reports, phone calls, and all the other responses to his book. You're writers. Think about that.

I remember a conversation I had at the time with a bunch of industry people -- a couple of other editors, some authors, and an agent. This was long before Mr. Hatfield's revelations about his sources. We all agreed that the episode smelled funny to us, and that if you wanted to kill the story about Dubya taking cocaine, it certainly was an effective way to do it.

I've wandered far afield here. My point is that too many oddly tidy, convenient, thorough hands have been at work on Dubya's history. I have no patience with vulgar conspiracy theory, but I do think he's had the help of professionals, and I wonder how he got it.