Stating the obvious

Or at least, stating what by now should be obvious. The International Herald Tribune said on Tuesday that

Hans Blix, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector, said Monday that the Bush administration convinced itself of the existence of banned weapons on dubious findings before invading Iraq and was uninterested in hearing evidence to the contrary.

"I think they had a set mind," Blix said on NBC as he began a 10-day American book tour in the week marking the first-year anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion.

"They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were weapons," he said. "Like the former days of the witch hunt, they are convinced that they exist, and if you see a black cat, well, that's evidence of the witch."

Speaking more assertively about the war than he does in "Disarming Iraq," his new book, Blix charged the administration with invading Iraq as retaliation for the terror strikes on the United States, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attackers.

With Hans Blix and David Kay now both firmly in the camp of the apostates, is there anybody left - anybody at all - outside the White twins (i.e., House and -hall) who maintains that there was sound intelligence of Iraq holding banned weapons before the war?

Footnote: In his book, Blix diplomatically elides the question of if intelligence was manipulated,

saying only that it was "probable that the governments were conscious that they were exaggerating the risks they saw in order to get the political support they would not otherwise have had."

Exaggeration and even hyperbole are in the nature of political argument. You expect them and, if you're an alert political consumer, allow for them. (And, if you're an alert politician, use them.)

But exaggeration and deliberate misstatements are not the same. For example, saying "Saddam Hussein is the greatest danger we face!" (or, as an alternative example, "Global warming is the greatest danger we face!") is an exaggeration. There is no way to actually quantify threats, no scale to rank them, so in a philosophical sense, the statement should be taken the same way as an advertising claim, strictly in context and not necessarily literally.

That is, even if we were to assume claims about Saddam having had biochemical weapons were true, was that a greater threat than terrorism? Do you mean domestic or international? As a typical American, you are far more likely to be affected by unemployment than terrorism. But if terrorism does touch you, the consequences could be much more severe. So which is the greater threat? And over what time frame? In the longer term, isn't global climate change a greater threat than all of that? In the even longer term, what about an asteroid hit? None of this is meant to demean any of those or any other risks, but to point out the impossibility of actually ranking them in any agreed-on way that would allow one to be declared the "greatest."

But to take intelligence assessments, information to which only you have access, assessments that are full of "probably"s, "likely"s, and "we think so but we can be sure"s and present them as "definitely"s, "clearly"s, and "irrefutably"s is to distort the facts in a way that is intended to mislead your audience.

And, my friends, intentionally misleading someone is the very essence of lying.