Just when you think the nation's political discourse cannot get dumber, it does.
For the past two weeks, newspapers and broadcasters have written and pronounced millions of words about weapons of mass destruction. What did we know? When? How much was factual, how much fiction? Was the intelligence wrong or manipulated or both?
Behind all these words lies the assumption that the US went to war because Saddam Hussein had WMD or we thought he had them.
Yet Paul Wolfowitz, a top aide to the Secretary of Defense and an architect of the preemptive attack told us a year ago that WMD was - he didn't use the word but he might have - a pretext. And more recently, former Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill said the Administration was targeting Iraq from the day it moved into the White House.
Of course it was. The terrorist attack on 9/11/01 helped the Administration pass off an existing geopolitical scheme to knock off Saddam Hussein as part of a "war on terrorism." That seems crystal-clear, yet the national conversation on WMD continues unabated as if it is essential.
One of the tasks of the press in our society is to set a political agenda.
Promoting discussion of an item that is fascinating but not of the essence wastes time, hides deeper truths and plays into the hands of the powerful.