FORGING AHEAD

I think I’m addicted to writing about this post-9/11/Iraq junk. Just yesterday, I know, I implied I’d move on, yet here I am again.

But if there’s a cottage industry in forgery going on in Iraq, as Newsweek says, that’s bad news for anyone expecting to see facts dictate U.S. policy. While the Bush administration would sooner endorse gay marriages than admit a mistake, it’s possible there’s something else motivating its increasingly ludicrous insistence that there are weapons of mass destruction hidden somewhere in Iraq, and that they’ll be found. Eventually.

It makes sense because chemical and biological weapons have a very short shelf life, according to experts that include even the hawkish Kenneth M. Pollack, author of “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.”

So all the Bush administration has to do is keep poking around Iraq long enough for someone -- perhaps someone more accomplished than the concoctor of Niger uranium documents or Mohammad Atta memos -- to create fake weapons lists. The fact that the weapons degrade rapidly would make it very easy to back up the documents, in the Bush sense that a lack of evidence can be taken as proof of something that can’t be proven anyway. On the administration shopping list: a bunker with empty canisters with a fake document saying what the canisters once held. (Empty, in this case, would probably mean “filled with nonweaponized powder.”)

I would feel much more foolish about this whacked-out conspiracy theory if it weren’t that forged documents do, in fact, keep showing up, and they tend to, for some reason, support the Bush administration’s whacked-out conspiracy theories.