It seems now that the excuses for why we aren’t finding WMD in Iraq are as varied as the falsified reasons for invading Iraq were before the invasion. In the months before we sent forces in, we heard that Hussein had massive stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and had reconstituted its atomic program; but now a massive, long-term search has brought up only a few empty trucks that even the U.S. State Dept. doesn’t think were for WMD production and a small cache of 12-year-old parts and plans for atomic production, which if anything show that the atomic program was not in fact reconstituted.

So what are the excuses? The weapons are still there, but hidden (said “massive stockpiles” must be damn well hidden to avoid any detection after this time); the Iraqi public and people involved are still so terrified of Hussein they won’t speak (right); the weapons were moved before/during the invasion (read: we may need justification for war against Syria); the weapons were destroyed before the invasion (how stupid is that? If they destroyed the WMD before the invasion, why not shout it to the world and avoid the invasion in the first place?); or the WMD were looted (every single last gas canister and document? And if so, why haven’t we found even the smallest part of these massive stockpiles in looter’s caches that have been found?).

How about this possibility: we were totally lied to.