I heard an interesting little tidbit yesterday from a friend of mine with a lot of contacts overseas.
He says that the attempt by the U.S. to justify this war in Iraq is so lame because they can't reveal 95% of the things that would dispel all doubts about what the U.S. is doing.
The reason for this, he says, is that if the American public was made aware of the gross incompetence, malfeasance, dereliction of duty, etc. that has been tolerated in any number of government agencies over the last ten years, the ability of the U.S. government to function in any capacity would be severely compromised.
Item #1 on his list was the asinine approach of the Clinton administration to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. I was quite startled at what this guy knew, considering he wasn't even a U.S. citizen until recently.