To clairfy my earlier statement, it's not that I don't think Powell laid out evidence that was orders of magnitude better than our president, it's just that the evidence seemed a little shallow. Let's ignore HUMINT (all those "reliable sources") and focus on the imagery and SIGINT. The first conversation recorded was clearly the more damning of the two: a clear directive that something inappropriate was going on. But the heart of the discussion? A "modified vehicle", from the evil workshop, you know. Was it just me or did it sound like some sort of weird toy factory? As for the vehicle itself, it sounded like someone had lowered their pick up truck and attached some nitrous and was worried that the cops might catch them drag racing. Still, something was obviously going on that it shouldn't have....begin rant.

This in a country run by a CRAZED MADMAN.

That's what I keep running though my head: the guy murdered thousands of his own people. Yet we're focusing on two army officials talking about modified vehicles? End rant. Back to the evidence. The second signal intercepted was much harder to decipher. Someone was telling someone else to clean out a rubbish yard and then to destroy said message. Not much detail, overall. Something bad, right? Because otherwise they wouldn't want to destroy the message. Of course, North Korea is flaunting the fact that they pulled out of a nuclear non-prof agreement and are now building weapons grade plutonium with no answer from us. No answer? Why the disconnect between NK and Iraq? Sure, we were shown satellite imagery of possible chemical weapons bunkers. Yet the "after" pictures, which should have shown the bunkers without the decontamination vehicle or the security box, mainly showed the UN convoy approaching. What was in those bunkers? Clearly, the Iraqis would have had to say something, right?

Far more damaging, in my mind, were the images of convoys of trucks at different facilities. Let's speculate, for a moment, that any additional evidence the US has actually pinpoint where these munitions are being held. And, assuming that we're going to war shortly, there'd be no reason to tip our hand to the Iraqis, because presumable we'd want to secure these areas as quickly as possible in the ensuing conflict. What does this mean for today? Well, for starters, it means that both the US and Iraq want the inspectors to be merely "frustrated" than to actually find banned munitions. So the inspectors were probably an idiotic solution to begin with.

But, as much as I think the Iraq situatino needs to be dealt with, at the most we're talking about biological or chemical weapons. Meanwhile, those crafy NKs are assembling plutonium bombs courtesy our anti-terror allies, the Pakistan government. Go figure. Maybe we're about to go to war there, too, and we just don't want to tip our hand. Or maybe, just maybe, this administration lacks the courage to fight a fight that might be politically costly, instead of one that can be easily won in a matter of weeks.