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By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: February 2, 2004
WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 - President Bush will establish a bipartisan commission in the next few days to examine American intelligence operations, including a study of possible misjudgments about Iraq's unconventional weapons, senior administration officials said Sunday.
The president's decision came after a week of rising pressure on the White House from both Democrats and many ranking Republicans to deal with what the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called "egregious" errors that overstated Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and made the country appear far closer to developing nuclear weapons than it actually was.
Up until the announcement, both Bush and Vice-President Cheney had been oddly insistent that WMD stockpiles might still be discovered, persisting in this belief in the face of overwhelming evidence. Dr. Lawrence Stackhouse Cuttlefish, Director of the Cuttlefish Clinic for Satirical and Imaginary Disorders, suggested that the seemingly boneheaded beliefs stemmed from a rare neurological condition known as Munchausen-Weaselitis."
"Put simply," said Dr. Cuttlefish, "this condition causes patients to believe in the existence or efficacy of new weapons systems based not on empirical evidence, but on the unwillingness of their inferiors to tell them the truth, combined with their unwillingness to listen. The bomber and missile gaps of the 50s and 60s are classic examples."
Dr. Cuttlefish is excited these days, as he believes he has discovered a new variant of the condition, which he modestly plans to name The Cuttlefish Syndrome. "We've always believed that Munchausen-Weaselitis worked only for enemy systems, but now we have evidence that it works for one's own programs too. Saddam clearly had the same kind of bad advice, wishful thinking, and inattention to detail, all of which combined to cause him to believe in his own WMD programs when none in fact existed. He was, if I may be witty, distracted by the clouds of ink spilled by his beaurocrats - he had Cuttlefish Syndrome."
Asked if any other world leaders suffered from Cuttlefish Syndrome, the Doctor winced, but continued "Well, it appears that Bush and Cheney suffer from it as well, in connection with their so-called 'missile defense program.' Clearly they believe that they have such a system ready to deploy, when in fact team of UN inspectors have been unable to find any evidence of such a system in the U.S. arsenal. Sure, they have a bunch of disaggregated parts, tons of paper studies, and some amusing computer animations, but do they have a functioning system? No. And yet they not only spend money for it, but ask for more."
Other observers note that the two diseases seem to be related - the Russian Federation seems to be worried about this non-existent missile defense system, which can only be explained by Putin's falling victim to Munchausen-Weaselitis.
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