Lemme tell ya something about WMDs, now that Big Joe has raised the issue... I feel compelled to remind people that Saddam Hussein (was that his WWF wrestling name?) absolutely wanted the world to believe he had WMDs. This is true regardless of whether he really had them (and you'd have to scour the inside pages of newspapers to find stories confirming uranium transactions in Niger).

Being in the Northeast, I regularly get to hear otherwise reasonable people voice "sincere" doubt that the totalitarian regime in Iraq was in any way a threat to the west.

How much of their thinking is wrought by modern liberalism's fetish for "peace at any cost"? And how much more of it is attributable to hatred of Bush and a desire to install a Democrat administration. So be it: that's how politics works?

Even after you adjust for the political bias, the critique leveled against Bush is just plain moronic. Iraq wanted neighboring countries (not to mention some internal populations) to believe he had weapons of mass destruction. It's no different than walking into a bar with your hand in your coat and noisily exploiting the "careful, he's got a gun" fear effect -- it only works until someone either calls your bluff (dangerous for the bluff-caller) or pulls out a bigger gun and uses it first (which is what the U.S. did -- and should be ready to do again).

Now it's Iran rattling the nerves of nearby nations as it gins up its nuke factories. Keep in mind, Iran was one of the countries Iraq most wanted to terrorize with its phantom (or not-so-phantom) WMD projects. What's the likelihood that Iranian radicals will be the first to get a nuke into terroristic operation?

I don't know the answer to that, but I hope they know at the CIA and FBI (yeah, I know: no reason to rely on those federal bureaucracies any more than we can currently rely on the Post Office... or the Social Security Administration... or any of the others).

Anyway, here are my predictions (so I can do the "I-told-you-so" thing at some later date):

If Bush assesses the threat properly and decides to move pre-emptively against Iran he will be loudly and indignantly reviled in the same way he is today -- more so because he'll be painted as a repeat offender.

If Bush does nothing and the U.S. is attacked, he will be condemned for not protecting us... From the WMDs... That he should have known existed...

Maybe the New York Times is right -- we should hand it all off to Kofi Annan. Then Bush can just blame the U.N. when all this goes wrong. Because it will go wrong -- there are just too many factions trying to sabotage any effort to get it right.

In any event, I bet UNSCOM can help Uncle Joe find his Groucho doll... Or can they?