Glenn Reynolds wonders aloud how Ohioans feel about the New York Times. We Midwesterners know how we're valued by the East and the City, and Ohio is a just-right-of-center state - so you can imagine the amount of daylight in between.

Anecdotally, regarding the Times story, I have yet to hear a single person in work or passing mention it once - a conversation about Cuba and North Korea the other day, not necessarily between cut-and-dried conservatives, didn't even come close to uranium.

Ah, but we wouldn't be Ohio without my metropolitan home of Cleveland where the main newspaper, the Plain Dealer, is happily performing the duty of toeing the left's line. Its foreign affairs correspondent is obviously intelligent and, from a radio interview I overheard once, sounds pleasant enough. But she's worked her way up to one hell of an up-high, flimsy limb with this one.

They represent, I represent. I responded in what is now an open letter:

Since the judgment of Saddam began to go against the way the left would have liked, your columns have become looser with reasoned arguments and thicker with rhetoric and supposition. Today's column is rife with fallacies.

The Daily Howler, a liberal classic, recently wrote an excellent editorial about the omission of the White House's precise defense for the purpose of demagoguery. It's excellent reading and cogent advice for the left should they wish to avoid the inevitable self-destruction of this latest hamstring attempt.

There are two unavoidable facts about the Niger documents, forgeries as they may be. First, the president's SOTU statement, imbued with innuendo by misrepresentation over the past weeks, was rather straightforward: the British had intelligence that Saddam sought uranium in Africa. Your July 10th column barely registered this - indeed, the truncated quotation is almost exactly identical to the dishonest "MoveOn.org" television commercial - and your column today simply leaves it behind, the situation now succinctly referred to as a "lie."

Second: assuming that the documents contributed greatly or wholly to that report, the British stand by their claim, which is neither a small fact nor information that can simply be discarded for the purposes of a streamlined argument. You address this in the 10th column with a glib, "The British did it." If the SOTU statement lacked attribution until now, you'd have a point, at least on a count of assigning blame after the fact. But the source of the information was provided from the beginning.

It happens that you are correct in your 10th column that political forces opposing liberation did not use the documents' rejection as a basis for any argument, a revelation made as early as March 8th - nearly two weeks before the beginning of hostilities. (Those in opposition instead warned of myriad catastrophes - major terrorist backlash, regional war, mass casualties, refugee exodus, the fabled "Rise of the Arab street" - that never occurred.) The lack of response to the questioning of the documents severely undercuts your argument that the uranium charge was a major component of the justification for war, notwithstanding its lack of use (and therefore its resonance with the American public) beyond the president's speech.

If we are to believe that the antiwar argument was serious in its challenge, it must have addressed all relevant flaws in the argument for military action. "Camel's nose under the tent" hardly counts as a logical challenge. You can't just wave off what arguments the Bush administration actually used as its dialectical backbone. If you believe that the administration made use of the quote to any major degree, prove it with media excavation - otherwise your argument is simply a lot of blowing of smoke. Read the Howler article.

The rest of your article drops straight into a morass of odd conspiracy theories. The military component of Resolution 1441 was American leverage? An uncorroborated report from CBS News? Those are bad red herrings and wackily ahistorical to Clinton's 1998 motivations taken in good faith.

Furthermore, where do you derive "lean" as an operative description of troop strength? I'd assume you would use an example of American-led reconstitution of an entire country after a victorious war. As numbers stand now, the Allies in Iraq are on par with the occupation of a country nearly identical in physical, habitable size, Japan (150,000 for 25 million versus 430,000 for 70 million) and, as of August, forces in Iraq will be double that (SCAP's forces were reduced to 200,000 by the beginning of 1946). Again, if you cannot offer any substantive contrast, you shouldn't be hazarding the observation. As for proof, the peanut gallery of retired generals and Democratic candidates who speak without context don't count.

I believed this past winter that Bush and Blair would trap themselves to a degree by capitulating to the United Nation's inherent inability to understand the Iraq's status - a dictatorship, contributing to a regionwide terrorist culture and in possession of illegal weapons - and legally advancing on the amoral subject of weapons only. If you're looking for "hidden" motives, winning the war on terror by defeating the Near East's culture of death through a toppling of the most dangerous, influential regimes first might be a place to begin.

The evidence against Saddam Hussein is overwhelming; he was not framed, nor did Bush need the uranium charge to convince the public. A niggling uncertainty will not go far. Most Americans will offer their benefit of the doubt not to a foreign dictator but to their president.

Baroque phase? It's well into Dionysian.