If I ever meet this guy Manuel Castells I'm going to bop him on the head with a rubber chicken repeatedly while shouting "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Then I'll spit in his drink and put my cigarette out on his tie.

Anyway, he has this piece in Saturday's La Vanguardia. It's titled somewhat grandiosely "Iraq, Year I". Here it is.

...The Iraq War has changed the geopolitics of the world and affected our everyday lives. That's why it might be useful to reconstruct the process which has led us to the explosion of Iraqi popular anger against the forces of military occupation, including the Spanish soldiers of the Plus Ultra brigade.

"Explosion of Iraqi popular anger"? I think "minor terrorist offensive, now quelled" would be more accurate. And what's this "affected our everyday lives"? Is he talking about 3/11 in Madrid? Is he implying that the Iraq War was the proximate cause of that attentat? If he is, he's lying.

We now have new information, which has become known through a tenacious effort of societies and journalists to learn facts that our governments had hidden or manipulated. The following summary is based on that information.

Manny, you and Beirut Bob and Tikrit Tommy are heroes, you really are. Are you saying the Spanish, American, and British governments covered up the truth? That's a very strong statement. It seems to me you need some pretty strong arguments to back that up.

1. The Iraq war had little to do in its origin with the struggle against Islamic terrorism, though the barbaric attack of 9/11 created the psychological conditions to apply a previously decided policy by the group of neoconservatives who arrived to the White House with Bush. Nor was it related with weapons of mass destruction that Iraq received from the US and other Western countries during the 1980s but that were no longer effective in the moment that they were used as the pretext for an attack. In fact, as Narcis Serra has written, the attack by the US and its allies occurred precisely because they knew that those arms didn't exist, because otherwise they would have taken more careful precautions the heavy losses and potential biological or nuclear contamination that might have resulted from the invasion. As I wrote in an article in El Pais, in October 2002, and as Clarke's recent testimony before the American Congress confirms, the war on Iraq had been decided before September 11 and active preparations began at the end of September 2001. Everything else was political maneuvering in order to try to obtain UN approval. The CIA lied to Powell, Powell repeated the lies in the Security Council, and many European leaders, not all of them conservative, accepted these lies as convincing proof.

It is not news that both the Clinton and Bush administrations had been planning military action ever since Saddam expelled the UN inspectors in 1998. The US had total and complete justification in any attack on Iraq after that date, because Saddam had broken the cease-fire he signed back in 1991. Not only that, but Saddam's air force repeatedly violated the no-fly zones and actually attacked American and allied aircraft during the 1990s. That is also a violation of the cease-fire and another casus belli. Bill Clinton did nothing, however. Bush came into office determined to do something about Saddam, and after 9/11, Iraq became Priority Two after Afghanistan in the War on Terror. See, the War on Terror is being fought on several fronts: against terrorist gangs like Hamas and Al Qaeda, against rogue states and failed states like Afghanistan and Iraq who give aid and comfort to terrorists, here in our own countries with police and security work, at the intelligence level. Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was merely one of the multiple arguments in favor of the attack on Saddam's regime. We know he had them--everyone admits that, he actually used them--and we know he was maintaining his weapons programs active, but we still don't know what he did with the stuff we know he had, if that makes any sense. That does not constitute lying by the CIA or anyone else. I repeat, Saddam's WMD were only one of several cases for war and not the most important.

No, the mistake that was made was Bush's going anywhere near the UN. He should have just said, in the wake of 9/11, "Look, we're going after anyone who even smells like an Islamist terrorist. Anyone who wants to help can. The rest of you, whatever, but we recommend you stay out of the way. And if that's arrogant, remember, we just got hit hard by these guys and they are never going to do it again if we can help it. So stick it. The United Nations is irrelevant, as we have several legitimate cases for war against just about everybody but Israel and Turkey in the Middle East and we do not need anyone's approval in order to take them up."

Nothing Dick Clarke said was news to anybody, and the interpretations that Castells makes of that little tempest in a teapot are ridiculous, is is the claim that the Americans knew Saddam had no WMD and the evidence is that they didn't properly protect themselves against said WMD. That is truly insane. American troops were very well protected against WMD and American leaders took the threat very seriously.

Oh, yeah, the United States never sold Saddam anything resembling a chemical weapon. In fact, the only thing we ever sold him were some 60 helicopters in 1989, after the Iran war ended but before the Kuwait invasion. Those were non-military helicopters, but Saddam converted them for military use. That's it. Saddam's arms sources were the Soviet Union, China, and France. Not the United States.

Castells has six more points but I can't stand any more of this crap today, so I'll be giving you a point or two more a day.