Appointocracy not democracy: The White House's plan for transferring power to the Iraqis gives lip service to democracy but, as Naomi Klein writes, is essentially an appointocracy: "Iraqi sovereignty will be established by appointees appointing appointees to select appointees to select appointees. Add the fact that Bremer was appointed to his post by President Bush and Bush to his by the US Supreme Court, and you have the glorious new democratic tradition of the appointocracy: rule by an appointee's appointee's appointees' appointees' appointees' selectees." What she thinks the administration's aims are really about? "For the White House, the only way for its grand economic plan to continue is for its military occupation to end: only a sovereign government, unbound by the Hague and Geneva conventions, can legally sell off Iraq's assets."

"I don't think they ever existed." David Kay, the just-resigned CIA official who led the hunt for Saddam's WMDs, now admits that a significant chemical and biological weapons program probably never existed in Iraq in the 1990s, casting the legitimacy of the war into even further doubt. But what about "weapons of mass destruction–related program activities" Bush talked about in the State of the Union?