If you want to try to wait until the very last minute

“If you want to try to wait until the very last minute, you’d better be very confident of your

intelligence because if you’re not, you won’t know when the last minute is,” Perle told Reuters on

the sidelines of an annual security conference in Munich.

“And so, ironically, one of the lessons of the inadequate intelligence of Iraq is you’d better be

careful how long you choose to wait.”

And he’s exactly right, if you understand him on his own terms – the longer you wait to attack a non-

threat, the more apparent its lack of a threat will become, thus undermining public support for the

predetermined outcome. Can’t have that.

(Via Arthur Silber, who has much more analysis of this and related matters.)

“In between our last two posts I went to Drudge to see what was happening in the world. The lead story

was about a ship disaster in the Red Sea. From the headline picture, it looked like a cruise ship. I

therefore assumed that some people very much like the Americans I went cruising with last year were the

victims. I went to the news story. A couple of sentences in, I learned that the ship was in fact a

ferry, the victims all Egyptians. I lost interest at once, and stopped reading. I don’t care about

Egyptians.” -John Derbyshire 2/3/06