WMDs go AWOL
From the Los Angeles Times:

As Joseph Cirincione, a top weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment, put it, the purported existence of those weapons "was the core reason for going to war with Iraq and the reason we had to go now If we don't find fairly large stockpiles of these weapons, in quantities large enough to pose a strategic threat to the United States, the president's credibility will be seriously undermined and the legitimacy of the war repudiated."

That concern is largely absent in the U.S. media, where "liberation" is now a code word that smoothes over any irritating questions one may ask when a Christian superpower invades the heart of the Muslim world. Its partner phrase, "the building of democracy," is also all the rage, as if real democracy was something you could create with Legos or SimCity software.

At this point, though, we can only hope it will all turn out for the best, and that a retired U.S. general will figure out how to use the country's natural resources to end poverty, build excellent schools and provide crime-free streets and an electoral system where positions of power don't go to the highest bidder. Then he can come back and apply this genius at home, where we've got plenty of unwelcome violence, poverty and on-the-take politicians.

However, in the unlikely case this fantasy comes true, albeit at an untold price in money, lives and human suffering, it should be remembered that this was not the justification for war given to the American people.

And, in a more sober mood, one must still ask the embarrassing yet essential question: Did our president knowingly deceive us in his rush to war?

If he did, and we are truly concerned about our own democracy, we would have to acknowledge that such an egregious abuse of power rises to the status of an impeachable offense.

I think this is the first time I've seen the i-word in relation to Bush's own adventure. I notice elsewhere that 'Garner of Arabia' is developing some traction. It's an obvious and shameless steal from Mike Carlton's 'Lord Downer of Baghdad'.