Bloodless Coup

Did you ever expect something other than the search to end with a whimper rather than a bang?

I'm also confused about your hope of a poorly worded sentence. Have you ever not thought that the administration wanted to find WMD? You could discuss their motives (ie believing that WMD are still there somewhere, we are disappointed not to have found them before having to discontinue the search VS. we based a whole war around it and we sure better find it and thus are disappointed not to have proof for our rationale) in wanting to find WMD, but at least for my part I've never doubted they wanted to find the weapons.

i'm with binky on what the administration "wanted" -- and not just once they were there and the iraqi army had bailed (to legitimate the occupation), but also, i believe, because the neo-con cabal (i'm being glib; humor me) wanted this war, even if it required substantial loss of life, and they behave like a bunch of drunken cowboys at every turn. granted, as it turned out, they didn't need real, actual, touchable WMD's to engender the war (as we've seen, and our children have died to illustrate), but surely their lives would have been easier, their images burnished, and their political careers more certain had the WMD's been found. they're still doing fine, but many polls leading up to election day suggested that the people are restless over much of what they were told pre-iraq, and whatever else it stood for, bush's narrow victory did not stand for a bona fides endorsement of that particular aspect of his first term.

Ya'll are probably right - it's just so depressing to acknowledge that.