IRAQ: A BAIT-AND-SWITCH CON JOB

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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/030823/79/51u0h.html&cid=123&ncid=1501

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- We were in North Carolina on Tuesday, delivering the last of our children to college. I left my wife at a Borders bookstore along the way to meet a friend for tea, then headed for Durham. I turned on the radio and heard that the United Nations' headquarters in Baghdad had been bombed and that Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.'s special representative in Iraq, was dead along with at least a dozen more U.N. employees.

My wife's colleagues and friends. She works for the United Nations, is director of one of their principal offices. I turned around, went back to the bookstore and told her what had happened. "The U.N. will stay in Iraq," she said.

"So will we," I thought, meaning the Americans.

"We," Americans, are victims of one of the great "bait-and-switch" con jobs in recent history, taken into harm's way by history-ignorant ideologues. We were told we were in imminent danger, that a truly evil regime in Baghdad had the means and will to do us immediate and mortal harm, that the fools in "Old Europe" and the rest of the world were just cowards when they disagreed with us or tried to warn us it would not be that simple.

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