My fellow Americans,

By the end of today, American, Australian and British forces will have launched a large scale invasion of Iraq – a country in the Middle East about which you know very little.

We have tried, over the last weeks and months, to convince you that there is a gathering danger – we never said ‘imminent’ – and that Saddam Hussein will launch an attack using Weapons of Mass Destruction but the reality is that we have very little evidence of that. We do have photos of two suspicious looking Winnebegos that some of our experts tell us could be used to launch weather balloons (but that’s exactly what Saddam would want us to believe if he were trying to conceal chemical weapons!)

You’ll note that we never actually said ‘nuclear weapons’ and if some of my staff have mentioned ‘mushroom clouds’, it’s not their fault if the more gullible among you connected that with our claim that Saddam has nuclear weapons because, clearly, she was thinking of something else.

It’s also not Tony Blair’s fault if, when he said that Saddam could launch a chemical attack with 45 minutes, people would somehow associate that with the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction claim. How was he to know that the press would put it on the front page without noting that he was talking about battlefield weapons?

No, the truth is that the WMD claim is just the ‘bureaucratic reason’ for the invasion. We have been planning this thing for years – despite our recent protestations to the contrary – and the 9/11 attacks, although unrelated to Saddam or to Iraq gave us just the pretext we needed.

We are pretty confident that we’ll find a WWII era shell or two and we’ll claim that that’s what we were talking about all the time and, if we don’t find one of those, we’ll claim that he probably moved them all to Syria. Heh! Heh!

With any luck – and a bit of help from Fox News – 63% of you will become convinced that we did actually find WMDs after all! As for the remainder, we’ll claim that everyone believed Saddam had WMDs – even the French. After all, you won’t remember the distinction between ‘we need to let the inspectors finish the job’ and ‘we are sure he has nuclear weapons’. And he certainly did have chemical weapons back in 1988 – he used them on his own people – back when we were treating Saddam as a friendly. You’ll certainly forget that Rumsfeld claimed to know exactly where they were – ‘in the area of Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat’.

‘Weapons of Mass Destruction program related activities’ by themselves are not nearly scary enough to get the American people behind us which is why we have been playing up the ‘Al Qaeda has ties with Iraq’ angle. We only have one questionable account of someone meeting someone or other in Prague but, if the worst comes to the worst, we can just repeat the story about a senior Al Qaeda operative who went to hospital in Baghdad- that’s clearly a link! And perhaps our invasion will attract a whole bunch of Al Qaeda sympathizers to Iraq – maybe it will even create some – and then we can claim that we are fighting in Iraq to defeat the people who wouldn’t be in Iraq if we hadn’t invaded in the first place? It sounds silly now but, trust me, in a couple of years people will be saying this stuff with a straight face.

Both of these reasons, though, will soon be forgotten and we’ll be justifying the war by referring to the terrible attrocities that Saddam committed while he was ‘Our Man’.

It’s funny how, when you think about it, all the realists, for years to come, will be justifying this war for humanitarian reasons and, if it goes badly, it will discredit the idea of liberal intervention for decades! Hope no other situations arise in the next couple years where a humanitarian intervention really is required or we’ll look pretty silly. <gulp>

The good news is that the costs are expected to be low – Wolfie expects that the war will pay for itself. It certainly won’t cost $100 billion like some people are saying (we fired Lindsey already). Rumsfeld says he’s not sure whether it will last six days or six weeks – it certainly won’t last six months – and the idea that it will take several hundred thousands of troops to secure the country…well that’s just laughable (we fired Shinseki too).

No, my fellow Americans, we are at a turning point in America’s history. After 9/11, when we have the overwhelming support of almost every country in the world – when even Jaques Chirac said that ‘Today, we are all Americans’ – and after the invasion of Afghanistan when even all the muslim countries were cooperating to overcome the Taliban – when there was unprecedented cooperation in the War on Terror and we vowed that we would catch Bin Laden ‘Dead or Alive’ – it is unthinkable that we would squander that goodwill or that our approval rating in pro-American Jordan will drop to 9% or that Bin Laden’s approval rating will exceed mine or that or that tensions between Europe and America will rise to the levels not seen in 50 years or that our armed forces would be stretched beyond sustainable levels or that my administration will routinely slur our political opposition as pro-terrorist or that 4000 American soldiers will die or that the war will cost several trillion dollars or that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will die or that the occupation of Iraq might continue for decades to come.

Given that all of those things are unthinkable, my fellow Americans, I hope I can count on your support until January 2009 when the whole deal becomes the next president’s problem.

But, my fellow Americans, when times get tough and those liberals are reminding you of all these facts and you vaguely remember that you believed my lines and that you questioned your fellow American’s patriotism and that you can barely keep straight all the various justifications and the Plan for Victory and the Strategy for Victory and the temporary surge that lasts for years, just remember that you were all for it and that there was no way to know then what you know now!

God Bless America!