damn it! the WMD's were right under our nose the whole time!

This is odd on so many levels. Diplomatic reasons and rationale for actually storing chemical weapons at the UN totally escape me. Why not the arsenal in Alabama where all of our stock-piles are held? Or some other insignificant Southern state?

By the way, having supported the US Dept of Energy with the contract support for the extraction of nuclear waste from Tuwaitha, South of Baghdad (formerly classified, when I worked on the program), I can assure you; there was a ton of bad stuff in Iraq. You are naive, ignorant or too married to your political paradigm if you believe otherwise. It may not have been the best marketing/sound-bite choice to make the case to the American people that the war was so much of WMD's, but I personally feel the story of Iraq's weapons program is still, yet incomplete. There's far too much publicly available info regarding the sat photos and logistics trails of convoys moving from suspected weapons sites, West to Syria in early 2003, for me to believe that Saddam's regime got rid of the weapons programs and ambitions in three years.

I may go into much further nuanced hypothesis and thoughts on the war, the time leading up to war and the post-victory occupation when time and energy affords. I was totally and completely burnt-out on the topic when I first moved out here in Feb of 2005, as it had only been months since I got back--and I hated the rhetoric and close-minded propaganda that was constantly spewed about the war--always, ironically, by people that had spent the war mostly in Starbucks, production companies, Hollywood clubs, Vegas and the classroom. It seems to mean so little to most people that I was actually there; serving at the seat of power/media/military operations at the CPA in the Palace...but the only thing that mattered was whether I "was for or against the war".

You know what? It's complicated. But I am for total intellectual honesty. And I am against stupidity. So take your Sean Hannity and Terry McCullough sound-bites and shove them up your collective asses.

Whoa. Long overdue, micro-vent.

thank you for listening :)

jls