It's disappointing to see that Andrew Sullivan has fallen in with those insisting that less than a month after the end of major combat operations is time enough to find overwhelming evidence of atomic, chemical and biological weapons research by a regime that has had literally a decade to develop and perfect schemes of binary and trinary refinement for modular, covert, frangible and elusive means to gross-scale weaponry in a country the size of - all together now - California. This is irrespective of last year when even the egomaniacal Saddam Hussein could understand that he had it coming to him: nine months following President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address where the president declared Ba'athist Iraq part of the Axis of Evil, and six months to expose the United Nations Security Council as a corrupt deliberative body unwilling to prosecute its own declared law - instead, shielding or actually colluding with Saddam Hussein - before Allied armed forces finally swept in and shattered all significant Ba'athist elements inside Iraq.

So the Ba'athists, led by Saddam, had on their hands an entire decade of demonstrated weakness from Americans and Western and Eastern allies alike. President H. W. Bush spared Saddam in 1991, even allowing him murderous gesticulation of dismay with would-be Shiite revolts. A series of punitive measures were leveled on Saddam, defied by Saddam, and, in the United Nations' refusal to enforce those measures, defeated by Saddam. In 1998, President Clinton went so far as to strip off the last thread of gossamer seriousness, escalating international rhetoric to military posturing that might have led to Iraqi liberation five years earlier; but Clinton eventually - and clearly premeditatedly - relented, withdrawing all threats of deposition, then settling with clumsily ineffective airstrikes and the United Nations' hearty discussion about reengaging its own special pastiche of monitored disarmament, before dropping the topic altogether to focus on his perjury impeachment.

The war presented the sort of rift betwen media and population that many, conservatives especially, had been looking for. The everyman was patient, faithful, and quite content to appraise the success of military actions in Iraq at the end of a given week, if not at the completion of the operation. The average media intellectual was effusive, distrustful, antsy and spoke carelessly from an uninformed perspective. Never mind how many Americans died island-hopping against the Japanese: one support unit had been ambushed by the Republican Guard! Any slight tactical frustrations were magnified into fatal cracks as if to split the hulk of the American war machine. When Basrah, Najaf and several other moderate to major population centers were left behind by the main column racing to Baghdad, every pundit and anchor with far too much impulse and far too little basic modern military knowledge opined on the matter as if delivering a spiteful mortuary tribute for the entire operation. George S. Patton wasn't known best for offensive timidity when he said "There is another thing I want you to remember. Forget this goddamned business of worrying about our flanks. We must guard our flanks, but not to the extent that we don't do anything else. Some goddamned fool once said that flanks must be secured, and since then sons-of-bitches all over the world have been going crazy guarding their flanks. Flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not us."

But who returned to that quotation? Or would that have added a dimension to the circumstances precluding pith and poison wit?

For journalists, few and far between were level-headed opinion columns displaying a modicum of faith and a firmly held tongue. Worse still, the media hasn't learned. The inevitable, historically documented problems of displaced persons; food, water and electricity shortages; or lawlessness - in post-war Germany, shops would carry signs that read "Closed Due to Looting" - are irrelevant to the intellectual. It's a crisis! Successes aren't occurring every hour on the hour in time for full reports at the bottom of the clock? The American people have been deceived!

And the weapons, with all the time allowed Saddam for twelve years, all the allies willing to spirit away the programs in countless, inconspicuous shards? Never mind that the same naifs who thought a limp-wristed United Nations team of uninterested bureaucrats could pull weapons programs out of the hands of a demonic regime were actually waiting for warehouses full of incrimination, complete with a shrill-laughter-saturated videotape of Saddam narrating the whole of his diabolical scheme. Instead, blame is launched squarely onto the White House.

Some blowhard somewhere started the call for "an explanation" requisite of President Bush, else the furies of Western elucidation carve him up with hail and lightning, as Classically Greek a spectacle as it would be Nixonian.

Andrew Sullivan wants a piece of the explanation, too. I agree that Bush should give him one - a good, sit-down talk about history and reality. For the rest of you impetuous lot: stagger your op-eds on the final judgment of a decade-long process to intervals greater than seventy-two hours.