I got a telemarketing call to renew my NYT home delivery the other day, and I said, "Nah, that paper just makes shit up." The guy chuckled wearily and said, "Yeah, that's what people tell me all day."Jesus! All day long this guy is calling people who used to pay for the paper and now they're telling him, "No thanks, we don't want your lies."
Far from being sinister, that's actually quite reassuring. If, as Wolfowitz suggests, the only thing the various squabbling members of the American foreign policy establishment could agree on about Iraq was that it possessed WMD, then the evidence they saw must have been pretty compelling. The State and Defense Departments, it is widely known, are locked in a fairly constant struggle with one another. Yet according to Wolfowitz, they were both ready to concede the fact that Iraq's WMD programs posed a threat large enough to justify war.