It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
On July 12, 2004, George W. Bush uttered the following defense of his war of choice against Iraq:

"We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them."

Let's take that sentence apart. First of all, good grammar, Mr. President. It's nice to see you try on that account.

But more substantively, notice how far George W. Bush has come in one short year. It used to be that Bush claimed Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Then Bush claimed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs. Then Bush claimed that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction related programs. Now Bush claims that Hussein had the capability of producing weapons of mass destruction.

The capability. Is that enough to go to war? Intelligence experts have now pretty much agreed that Hussein did not have the capability to produce nuclear weapons (as Bush claimed he did -- another slip of the truth), so we'll have to assume Bush meant that Hussein had the capability of producing chemical or biological weapons.

I hate to break it to Mr. Bush, but just about any country who employs a PhD-level microbiologist has the capability of producing biological weapons, as our own nation's domestic anthrax scare of 2001 demonstrated. And as the Sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway demonstrate, even an esoteric religious cult has the capability of producing chemical weapons. That's such a low standard as to be ridiculous. If the capability of producing chemical or biological weapons is the essential criterion for going to war against a country, then by Mr. Bush's standard we're going to be sending our troops to countless unfriendly nations around the globe for some time now.

Unless, that is, George W. Bush is not leveling with the American people. Hmmm. Could that be what's going on here? Hmmm.

Posted by James Cook at 7:44 AM. # (permalink)




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