The war in Iraq: Were there weapons or weren't there? Was Saddam a threat or wasn't he? Is George leaving our troops to die, so he can get rich off oil deals?

Okay, here's the sitch: Saddam was parading around the middle east like the bad boy on the block. He'd used gas, and he gave the run around to inspectors, and all of the surrounding nations were scared to death of him, because they knew he'd used weapons before, and they were sure . . . sure . . . he had them now.

Even when they were arguing to give the inspectors more time, the opposing nations in the UN weren't arguing he didn't have the weapons. They were just saying they thought the diplomacy deserved a chance.

Everybody was sure he had the weapons. Saddam was acting like he had the weapons.

So here's the metaphor to help everybody see this one clearly. Imagine it's Columbine High School, and the administration is scared to death and wants to get all the weapons off the campus. And there's this kid, see, who may or may not have been buddies with the guys who shot everybody up last time--nobody's really sure--but now he's parading around as if he's got something to hide, reluctant to let anybody search his bags or his locker, and the kid's got a history. The administration doesn't really want to do anything, lest they get sued, security of the students notwithstanding.

So finally some kids, worried about everybody's safety, wrestle his bag away, bustopen his locker, and as he runs off, inside both the bag and the locker they find maybe a bong and some schoolbooks.

The analogy is obvious, but in case you can't tell the players without a program--Columbine is Sept. 11, the kid is Saddam, the friends are Al-Qaida. The administration is the UN, and the kids who were worried about everybody's safety were the "coalition forces."

I like this analogy a lot. It shows everything in a pretty accurate perspective. It shows the UN as irresponsible (would you stand for it if your kids school acted like this?), George Bush as courageous for standing up to them, and leaves open the only two real possibilities for what was going on with Saddam. Just like the kid in this story, he either had the weapons or he didn't.

In the case of the first option, the move was justified, because the weapons really were there all along, and if there's any criticism, it's for letting those weapons get away.

In the case of the second option, where there were no weapons--think about it. The kid was walking around posturing like he was dangerous while the memory of the real danger was still fresh in everybody's minds. Did he really expect not to get called on it? Would you really accuse the other kids of having "bad information" when they weren't acting on rumors and whispers, but on what everybody pretty much considered to be pretty common knowledge, information the guy himself was doing everything to keep perpetuating?

Even if it's true that Saddam didn't have one drop of one chemical weapon, the idea that he had them was a large part of what made Iraq the formidable force it was in the Middle East. Even if it turns out that front was a facade, it was a facade that Saddam himself was carefully constructing. Not something George W. Bush propped up so he could knock it down.

I mean come on. Use your head. If the administration had really been fabricating the mountains and mountains of evidence in order to blatantly deceive the American people, all the while knowing that once he got in, Saddam wouldn't even have so much as a bottle of cough syrup, wouldn't George W. also have come up with a few liters of Botox to plant behind a barrel somewhere, so he wouldn't end up with egg on his face?

Or, to put it in terms that Michael Moore can understand, wouldn't a fictitious President fighting a fictitious war produce a fictitious weapon of mass destruction or two?

Fact is, Saddam, at the very least, was bluffing. And bluffing in a very dangerous game. Calling him on it doesn't make Bush a liar, or an idiot, or a manipulator. It just makes Saddam a bad card player.