Fool Me Once...Won't Get Fooled Again (Oh Yes, We Will!)

President Bush once famously mangled the old saying "Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me." He said in 2002:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

I was reminded of that this week in TIME magazine in an essay by retired Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who served as director of operations at the Pentagon's military joint staff. He is now speaking out against the war in Iraq and criticizes the administration for not focusing on Afghanistan and al-Qaeda following 9/11. He invokes the famous anti-Vietnam War song "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who in saying we have been fooled again, this time on Iraq.

"I now regret that I did not more openly challenge those who were determined to invade a country whose actions were peripheral to the real threat--al-Qaeda. I retired from the military four months before the invasion, in part because of my opposition to those who had used 9/11's tragedy to hijack our security policy."

This all was slammed home for me again this morning when I read in the Washington Post that a secret report has come to light that again undermines the stated initial reason for invading Iraq: that the rogue country had weapons of mass destruction and was poised to use them.

Fifty days after the fall of Baghdad, the president declared: "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." This was in the form of two small trailers that were said to be mobile labs for making biological weapons.

Reports the Post:

"A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement."

You see, we can get fooled again.

"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."

No, I'm starting to feel like we're the biggest sand toilets in the world.

Why Iraq Was a Mistake [TIME magazine]
Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried the Case for War [Washington Post]