SOrry, Bruce. I could have sworn you directly implied the condition of us being threatened by WMD had recently been or currently was a fact. I guess I over-justified the context of your remark. Sorry.

It seems to me on the face of it that a decent government, if it were going to operate on the notion that we were so threatened, should provide its people with the facts on which it bases that perception.

When W did so, the facts were poppycock -- Nigerian uranium and aluminum tubes and links between Saddam and Al Qeda, and WMDs in the desert -- they were al, apparently, figments of someone's overheated fears.

That does not mean they always will be. I hear you with regard to N Korea. The Russians are mor eon our side of things than they were back in the Cold War, and the Chinese are self-limiting -- they have too much inertia toward a middle class society, I htink, to put it at risk by going whacko all of a sudden. Not that I would put it completely past them.

A