Wed October 29, 2003 06:35 PM ET
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is considering shifting intelligence personnel in Iraq from the so-far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction to strengthen efforts to combat the intensifying resistance, officials said on Wednesday.
"What's more important right now and what's more destabilizing: the insurgency or knowing about the WMD?" asked a defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Officials said Pentagon leaders are considering reassigning a number of intelligence officers, interrogators, translators, linguists and others from the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which is conducting the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
President Bush cited what he said were Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons to help justify the war that toppled President Saddam Hussein, but such arms have not yet been uncovered.
White House advisors are hoping that the intelligence personnel will have the same effect on insurgents and guerillas as they had on WMD. "Hey, they went looking for bioweapons that the best minds in the government assured us were there, and there in bulk, and - presto! Not a gram to be found," said Karl Rove, Political Thaumaturge and Ventriloquist. "If they can do that again with the resistance, then Iraq will be as placid and compliant as, well, the American Media." Asked if he was suggesting that the intelligence personnel could actually make the resistance vanish by looking for it, Rove replied "Something made the WMD vanish, didn't it?"
Scientists were divided on the question of whether this new tactic would work "Well, I dunno," said Slipstream Hassenfuss of NYU's Department of . "They do say that you never find your true love until you stop looking, so I guess a corollary of that would be that actually looking means you won't find it, but I'm not sure that there's a one to one correspondence between the love of your life and a band of Ba'ath party guerillas. Unless we love the guerillas, which I'm pretty sure we don't. Right? I mean, soldiers aren't supposed to feel that way about other men…not that there's anything wrong with that."
Physicist were intrigued, however. "it's well established that the observation of a particle can collapse the waveform and thus can make its position or momentum fixed," said Leonardo P. Orbital, of USC's Physics Department. "Maybe this is some kind of anti-quantum effect, where the presence of an observer actually makes an object's position, or even existence, less fixed." Experts agreed that if this anti-quantum effect could be verified, its discovery could be a significant scientific advance. "Mechanical catfish are one thing," said Orbital, "but this is Nobel Prize material."
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The rest is the fakey part.
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