Last week's edition of the Weekly World News (you know, the one with "TWELVE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS ARE SPACE ALIENS! on the cover) contains a very interesting article entitled, "SADDAM WON IRAQ WAR … then CIA time travelers reversed his victory!"

Yes, according to America's most widely read newspaper, <blockquote>Madman Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction — and he used them to kill nearly 200,000 U.S. troops and defeat the Coalition!

But CIA agents who commandeered the dictator's secret time tunnel used the device to alter history so that the ghastly chemical weapons employed in the attack never existed…
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This story is actually a followup from a previous WWN story last year about how Saddam had built a time tunnel, described as looking "uncannily like the portal in the cult 1960s series <i>The Time Tunnel</i>."

For those of you who have never heard of the WWN (do such people exist?) it's the original Onion, a tabloid filled with the most amusing fake articles. The only difference is that many readers take the WWN seriously, whereas when people take the Onion seriously, it ends up in the news.

The reason I bring all this up is because the author of the article, one Mike Foster, has accidentally stumbled on the kind of explanation that could reinvigorate Bush's stumbling PR effort with the war!

I was in a bar last night, and I ended up talking to a veteran about the war in Iraq and how much bullshit it is. I know I keep referring to the article I wrote about the WMD issue, but let me restate my case more succinctly:

When you look at the decision to invade, you have to assess what we knew at the time, and what our ultimate objectives were.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the Bush White House was absolutely certain there were WMDs in Iraq. So they threaten Saddam with invasion if he does not disarm, giving him several weeks to do so. Faced with Iraq's refusal to disarm, the Coalition forces are sent in to overthrow the government, doing so in about a month.

The question I asked the vet was, "if Iraq actually had WMDs, what did we expect was going to happen when we invaded?"

You have to think about the nature of WMDs here, particularly the chemical and biological weapons Iraq was supposed to have. The reason states develop such programs is that they are cheap equalizers in the face of attack by a better-equipped enemy. Nuclear technology is expensive and difficult to procure, but chemical and biological weapons are much easier to make and have more bang for your defense buck.

As defense analysts pointed out, the most likely scenario in which Iraq's WMDs would be used is in self-defense in the face of an overwhelmingly better-equipped enemy, like, say, the invading U.S. Army. Let me tell you something; when the U.S. Armed forces show up at your door, it's pretty much over. Unless you're China, there is no way you can win a conventional war with America. The only hope is to use WMDs to repel them.

Getting back to the Weekly World News, we see a somewhat likely scenario about how the war might have gone had Saddam used his purported WMDs on the Coalition troops; it could have been really disastrous. Was this the plan, to force Saddam into using his WMDs on our troops?

Or, was it to give Saddam and the Ba'ath party about six weeks to sell or smuggle the weapons out of the country?