Global Eye -- Snuffed Candles.

(From The Moscow Times)

In a stunning development, the Bush Regime announced its unconditional and abject surrender in Iraq this week. The humiliating retreat was sounded by one of the chief architects of the war, deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz.

Well, perhaps it wasn't entirely unconditional. For the Bushists didn't actually surrender any of the territory they conquered, or the oil resources they are swiftly and ruthlessly exploiting through a series of quiet sweetheart deals that are tying up Iraq's national wealth for years to come, or the military forces they have thrust into the line of vicious and unremitting fire from Iraqis who object to the presence of foreign troops in their "Homeland." But what they did surrender, at long last, was the pretense that their pre-invasion warmongering -- built on iron certainties and "smoking guns" and "bulletproof evidence" (Don Rumsfeld's phrase) -- ever had the slightest connection to reality.

The twin towers of the Bushist case for war -- "imminent threat" and "connection to al-Qaida" -- have been crumbling for weeks, even among the bovine intellects of the Bush-whipped U.S. media, who had happily munched the thrice-chewed cud of the Regime's transparent mendacity during the long build-up to the invasion. Wolfowitz provided the final coup de grace on national television last Sunday, during an appearance on Rupert Murdoch's propaganda mill, Fox News.

Wolfowitz admitted that the entire public case for war was based on nothing but "murky intelligence." Of course, his boss, Rumsfeld, had already confessed that the war brief relied on "evidence" whose most credible tidbits were five years old at the latest -- a revelation that in a normal democracy would have brought down the government and led to criminal trials all around, but which passed virtually unnoticed by the dribbling bovines as they dully regurgitated their "embedded" cud.

But Wolfowitz went even further. Not only was the intelligence way past its sell-by date, it was "murky" at best -- that is to say, it was unclear, unsound, not entirely reliable, open to question, subject to doubt, impossible to confirm, of indeterminate veracity, riddled with falsities, marred by forgeries, unreliable. What's more, the White House itself confirmed that the Bushist bigwigs knew the intelligence was unreliable when they rolled out their war drums last fall.

In a maladroit attempt to extricate itself from the silly sideshow over "16 words" in a Bush speech referring to a non-existent attempt by Iraq to buy non-weaponized uranium ore from Niger, last week the Bushists released a top-secret "National Intelligence Estimate" from October 2002. The intent was to show that the Regime really did have some raw -- if "murky" -- data about Iraq's alleged nuclear program. But the NIE also revealed that intelligence services were actually telling the White House that Saddam Hussein was not connected to al-Qaida and was not ...