Why does he persist Bizarrely for probably the same reason as young Terry; because I'm not entirely gruntled with the way truth has been pushed aside and facts manipulated to make capital over the war in Iraq.
Unfortunately we come from diametrically opposed sides. He believes that Bush is right and that there is a wilfull conspiracy by lily-livered liberals to lie and confuse the issue which will deny him his status as a giant among statesman.
I believe there has been a policy of lies and half-truths from the neo-cons which will one day show the Bush administration to be moral and intellectuall pigmies.

As such, the position here mirrors the position in the grown-up world outside, and that means that you are never going to get accurate figures. It's the nature of stupid, evil of just plan controversial acts that the truth about them is often quickly fudged. More than 60 years after the event, we still don't know how many people died in Dresden. How many people did Stalin murder? We'll never know. Just as I fear we will never know the final butcher's bill for Iraq.

One of the reasons I adopt the tone I do with Teribus is because of his tendency to patronise and to belabour any opposing viewpoint with a barrage of selectively cut-and-pasted received opinion and because, in his pomposity, he often gets things plain wrong. In the past he has also made much of his naval background to imply that he has been vouchsafed a knowledge of strategic matters denied to us mere landlubbers.
And, as is my childish wont, I quite like pricking windbags.

As for the original question, looking back over an awful lot of windbaggery, I see Is this confusing or what?
My answer, unequivocally, is YES!