It is, apparently, Off-Their-Meds Week in Washington and London.

First we had Jack Straw, in attempting to justify the war on Iraq despite the failure to find any WMD or any program capable of producing same:

"What we're dealing with here is hindsight. What we have to make is judgments about future events. That's what we did ... I think that it was justified then and it is justified now.

The Iraqi people would have suffered grievously because Saddam would have reestablished his reign of terror worse ever than before."

What in the fuck is this supposed to mean?

What was "critical" about the "moment" chosen for invasion? The invaders said it was because Saddam had "failed to disarm". Who told them that? UNMOVIC? No. Quite to the contrary. In the absence of any "smoking gun" (or any other sort of proof, for that matter) the "critical moment" had nothing to do with the stated justification for the invasion. We can make guesses at what did prompt the specific timing of the invasion, in other words, but it's obvious to those with eyes to see that it was not the sudden appearance of WMD.

Using Straw's logic (maybe it's just too cruel and unusual, when all is said and done, to use the Bush and Blair Administrations' own logic against them--it's certainly as easy as taking candy from a baby), the Anglo-Americans should have launched the invasion no later than September 24, 2002--the date that Tony Blair insisted before the British Parliament "that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes..."

That the Americans and British then spent the next six months dicking off even while they were (for the sake of argument) painfully aware that Saddam was ready and willing to lay an attack upon the United States at any moment should (again, by the Administrations' own logic) be considered an act of criminal negligence.

Moving along, the assertion that if the "coalition" had not launched its invasion before obtaining Security Council authorization, "The authority of the United Nations would have been gravely weakened," is possibly the purest, most textbook example of doublethink ever put on display. But ever!

Finally, the claim that, "The Iraqi people would have suffered grievously because Saddam would have re-established his reign of terror worse ever than before," besides being grammatically and semantically challenged, is contrary to the evidence given in Human Rights Watch's annual country reports for Iraq--which harshly denounced the Human Rights abuses in Saddam's Iraq, but which, if one cares to read the successive reports from the late-'80s until the time of invasion, clearly demonstrate that Saddam was either incapable of or not willing to "reestablish his reign of terror worse than ever before".

The magnitude of his crimes steadily declined from their CIA-asset-era peak until Dubya's invasion. A period during which, it should be noted, he was able to remain in power because the Anglo-American sanctions so deprived the populace that it was completely dependent upon the state to survive. That is to say, the sanctions, in addition to killing 5,000 children per month, allowed Saddam to "reestablish his reign of terror," to the extent that he was able to, for well over a decade.

Meanwhile, in Washington, now that the previously ballyhooed "Autumn Surprise" regarding Saddam's weapons programs, forthcoming from David Kay, has in fact turned up, well, nothing, the Bush Administration is trying to revive the "shuck-'n'-jive postulate."

The SNJP works like this: having "put in place a double-deception program aimed at convincing the world and his own people that he was more of a threat than he actually was," sneaky Saddam was "bluffing, pretending he had distributed them to his most loyal commanders to deter the United States from invading."

There's only one problem with the SNJP: Saddam forgot to pull off the "double" half of his dastardly "deception".When in the fuck did he ever imply that he was in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction? Never, that's when.

Unless, you know, the entire world missed the "double-deception" when Saddam, during his Dan Rather interview, said something like, "Well, you see, I don't have any WMD on me, because I distributed them to my most loyal commanders [nudge nudge, wink wink, snigger snigger]." Following which, Saddam, having failed to notice the world's failure to notice his "slip" of the tongue, and having failed to notice that his "double-deception" had not succeeded in "deterring" the United States (indeed, having suffered hallucinations to the effect that the massive military force surrounding his country had turned around and gone back home), popped open a bottle of champagne to celebrate his wisdom and cunning.

In point of fact, Saddam repeatedly, consistently, and unambiguously denied having retained a WMD program. As it turns out, these claims were more or less corroborated by the prewar inspections, by UNSCOM's pre-"Desert Fox" activities, and by high-level defectors.

While we now know he was mostly telling the truth, it was certainly within the realm of possibility (or at least, conceivability) that he could have been lying.

If he did have the weapons, and assuming his "aim" was to prevent an attack by snookering the world into believing that he didn't have the weapons, lying would have been a logical course of action.

But if his "aim" was to deter an attack by duping the world into believing that he did indeed possess, say, weapons in the quantities suggested by Colin Powell on February 5, why the fuck would he need to pull a "double-deception" when he could simply sign off on Powell's testimony?

The postulate becomes even more bizarre when we learn that it apparently derives from "pre-war Iraqi communications collected by US intelligence agencies indicating that Iraqi commanders...were given the authority to launch weapons of mass destruction against US troops as they advanced north from Kuwait."

So in order for Saddam's "double-deception" to work, he has to know either that his group of "most loyal commanders" has been infiltrated, or, if he's given this authority through radio communications, that US intelligence will be able to intercept and decode the communications. And he has to trust that, once armed with this "knowledge,," the United States will share it with the world, and the world will accept that the United States' intelligence (the same intelligence that failed to prevent September 11, and that made such a botch-job of the February 5 presentation, remember) is competent to obtain such information, and that George Bush is telling the truth in the first place.

All this rigamarole in order to convince the world that he has the weapons!

Furthermore, given that Bush and Blair were accusing him all along of lying--that is to say, accusing him of actually retaining a weapons program--and were planning to invade anyway, where in the fuck would Saddam get the idea that pulling a "double-deception" (or, assuming his logical facilities were intact, a "single-deception") would deter an attack?

Are we really expected to swallow this garbage?