The sad part is, they're serious when they say stuff like this

Ken Adelman is one of the best-known "neoconservative" publicists.  He most recently distinguished himself for his famous prediction that the Iraq War would be a "cakewalk" for the Americans.  Other than that, he's best known for being an anti-arms-control director of arms control during the Reagan administration.

Now he's written one of the goofiest essays I've ever seen.  If his essay were a blog post, I would think it was some amateur rightwinger who thought he was being very cute and clever but had no idea how obviously clueless he is: The Nuclear Bluffers Los Angeles Times 10/22/04.

The gist of it is that Saddam Hussein was being fiendishly clever in letting people think he had weapons of mass destruction when he didn't.  It starts off:

Throughout history, world leaders have hidden their treaty violations and lied about it. No surprise there. But Saddam Hussein broke new ground in the world of strategic gamesmanship when he hid treaty compliance and lied about it.

It may sound weird, but the Duelfer Report documents that the weird was true. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Hussein actually complied with the U.N. resolutions that prohibited him from producing weapons of mass destruction. At the same time, he brazenly acted as if he were violating those resolutions.

Now, it's true that Saddam did interfere with inspections in various ways, eventually blocking their access to sites in 1998, prompting the inspection team leader Steve Ritter to pull the inspectors out.  Saddam claimed that the CIA was using the inspection teams to spy on Iraq, which the US government later admitted was true.  Bush has said over and over that Saddam "kicked out" the inspectors, which was not true.  But that, of course, hasn't stopped it from becoming accepted as fact anyway by the Foxist non-reality-based crowd.

Adelman continues:

It was the mother of all deceptions, and he succeeded nicely (until the moment he was overthrown, that is). We never, for a moment, suspected he was a clandestine complier.

Such behavior may seem inexplicable.

Well, if  "we" here means the Iraq hawks hellbent on war no matter what, I suppose we can say that's true, whatever the quaint notion of "true" means to the non-reality-based community.  Had Bush allowed the resumed UN inspections to continue in 2003 instead of invading Iraq and turned it into a failed state full of terrorists wanting to kill Americans, they would have verified that Iraq was complying.

No, Ken, it's not Iraq's behavior in this case that's inexplicable.  It's the insanely tortured argument that you submitted under your own name and the Los Angeles Times inexplicably considered fit to print.

It goes on.  The general idea being that the fact that Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction shows how dangerous he was.

For an aspiring 19-year-old blogger, this would have been a cutesy but forgettable attempt to justify the unjustifiable.  But for Ken Adelman, it's one more illustration of what kinds of hacks and fanatics today's Republican Party takes seriously on foreign policy.  No wonder we're in such a mess in Iraq.

One last note, since I am part of the Coalition of the Reality-Based.  I haven't done a fresh search for details while writing this.  But, as I recall, Saddam's government prior to the war denied over and over that they had weapons of mass destruction.  Now we know they were telling the truth.  Ahmed Chalabi and all the rest who were manufacturing claims to the contrary, and of course the president and the vice president and the national security adviser and the secretary of state and the secretary of defense and the entire Republican echo chamber, they were all wrong.

So just how is it that Saddam was running such a brilliant deception when he kept saying over and over and over again that he had no weapons of mass destruction?  And now, of course, even the Bush administration is reduced to claiming that he intended someday to restart programs to make WMDs.

And, as I said in the title, the sad part is that these people are really serious when they write this stuff!  Go read that silly thing.  Because if Bush gets elected next week, idiotic nonsense like this will continue to form the basis of American foreign policy.

One of the sentences quoted above, though, does have a nice literary touch:  "It was the mother of all deceptions, and he succeeded nicely (until the moment he was overthrown, that is)."

Yes, the non-existent strategy to deceive people about the non-existence of the non-existent WMDs succeeded brilliantly (until it resulted in the complete destruction of the government not using it).  This is goofier than the normal twice-weekly offering by Chuckie.