Rather than pipe up with the usual commentary about the Washington Post story re: the transparent falsity of the Iraq-Niger uranium claims, I would like to take this opportunity do something more productive and beneficial to society.
I shall attempt, here, to translate the events into an allegory that even children can understand.
It was 3 a.m. in Italy on Jan. 29, 2003, when President Bush in Washington began reading his State of the Union address that included the now famous -- later retracted -- 16 words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Once upon a time, back in the olden days when animals could talk, and wore clothes, and could read newspapers, and engaged themselves in the pursuits of agriculture, and music, and generally organized themselves into a primarily feudal society which in humans would be considered a dramatic step backwards but for animals was a very great step forwards indeed, there lived a somewhat gullible badger. He was proud and arrogant, like most badgers, especially any badger that had learned to talk and wear clothing (buttons, as in turns out, are a considerable impediment to most animals in the "wearing clothing" department, since very few animals have the manual dexterity to manipulate them, and so therefore the wearing of the really stylish outfits was exclusively limited to animals with good paw or beak control, whereas hoofed animals, for example, would primarily just throw on a shawl and hat and call it done, or perhaps gravitate towards simple skirts -- or even perhaps Hawaiian mumus, if they were especially daring individuals with an eye towards vibrant color.)
But this particular badger was somewhat gullible, and that is phrasing it politely, since this story is for children and children should always be taught to phrase things politely. In this case, "somewhat gullible" is polite speech for "stupid beyond the capacity for most humans or animals to reckon," but we shall not tell the children that, and instead continue on.
In any event, one day the badger, out strolling for a long walk into parts of the countryside that he had not been in before, came upon a traveling merchant in the form of a rather seedy-looking hare. And this merchant, after an embarrassingly small amount of salesmanship and haggling not worthy of repeating here, sold the somewhat gullible badger a handful of what he said, quite earnestly, were magic beans.
You know, magic beans. The old standby of olden days cultures: in the olden days, every gullible badger, or duck, or rabbit, or field mouse was keen to lay hold of magic beans, which were essentially the lottery tickets of the olden world, leguminous seeds of raw wishes, and both edible and plantable to boot. And like lottery tickets, they were mostly sought out in the world by the somewhat gullible, which is where our aforementioned badger comes in.
After haggling briefly with the hare and making his purchase, the somewhat gullible badger took to the road again, pleased with his own cleverness. And after a while, on this same country road, he came to a small collection of animals out tending their bean fields.
Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.
"See here," the somewhat gullible badger proclaimed. "I have bought some magic beans!" He held out his paws, in which glistened slightly less than a dozen round, black objects approximately the size of peas.
The animals looked, but their expression was not one of the expected awe. "Those are not magic beans," said a number of the animals: three rabbits and two voles, to be precise. They seemed quite certain about it -- resolute, even.
"What? What do you mean?" asked the badger.
"Those are not beans at all," said a rabbit, as the others looked on and nodded. "Those are rabbit droppings."
"Rabbit droppings? What are those? Is that a special kind of magic bean?"
"No," said the rabbit, taken slightly aback at the somewhat gullibility of the badger. "They are rabbit, er, droppings. They are certainly not beans, and they certainly are droppings. We should know, because we grow beans for a living, and to be quite blunt, those of us that are rabbits have certainly seen our share of rabbit droppings."
"Those of us who are not rabbits have certainly seen more than our share of rabbit droppings as well," said one of the voles, dryly.
"Nonsense!" scoffed the somewhat gullible badger. "You are simply jealous of my magic beans!" And he clutched them close to his chest and hurried on, much put out at the apparent insolence of the bean farmers.
After another short while of walking along the same dusty road, the badger came to a grizzled looking old weasel. "Look here," the somewhat gullible badger exclaimed. "I have bought some magic beans!"
In February 2002, the CIA received the verbatim text of one of the documents, filled with errors easily identifiable through a simple Internet search, the interviews show. Many low- and mid-level intelligence officials were already skeptical that Iraq was in pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The weasel looked, but his expression was one of amusement, not awe. "Those are most certainly not magic beans," said the grizzled weasel. "What you have there is a handful of rabbit crap." Weasels are earthy creatures, and where rabbits or voles might discreetly say "droppings", weasels are more than happy to say crap.
"Nonsense!" scoffed the badger. "They are quite clearly magic beans. I purchased them from a hare that was quite clear on the matter."
"Clear or not, you have been swindled," said the grizzled weasel. "I have seen enough young and gullible badgers come down this road with a handful of rabbit crap to know what rabbit crap looks like, and I assure you that what you are holding is very clearly rabbit crap, and was rabbit crap this morning, and yesterday evening besides. The day before that, it was likely a nice salad, or perhaps a muffin or a scone: it is hard to tell. But if you were wise, you would do well to just drop it and admit to being swindled, rather than getting rabbit crap all over your paws and lovely vest."
"You are jealous!" cried the badger. "Just like the rabbits and the voles, you are jealous of my magic beans!" And he clamored clumsily down the road, his prize held tightly, quite put out at meeting so many voices apparently all insistent on badmouthing his tremendous find.
The badger now hastened down the road again, this time at a decidedly brisk pace. He next met a pig, dressed smartly in a skirt and bright, flowered hat (as I mentioned before, buttons are an impossible art, for hoofed animals, and so accessorizing with hats, necklaces and the like is widely popular.) Again the badger proclaimed his find; again, the reaction was less than he had hoped for.
The interviews also showed that France, berated by the Bush administration for opposing the Iraq war, honored a U.S. intelligence request to investigate the uranium claim. It determined that its former colony had not sold uranium to Iraq.
"Those are not magic beans, my friend," said the pig, with a thick French accent. The pig, you see, was French, which was quite possibly the worst thing an animal could be, according to badgers, who in addition to being far less clever than they are usually portrayed are notorious bigots.
"That is the poop of a rabbit," the pig continued. "It is as clear as the snout on my face, and more aromatic than the flowers on my hat, besides."
"Piss off," said the badger rudely. "What do you know -- you are French!" And he bolted from the scene, paws clutched, but eyes flashing, at this point suspicious of an entire conspiracy against him, especially now that the French were involved.
It is somewhere near this point that most stories like this one would end, and the moral of the story, or the joke, or the climax would be here presented, under the oft-used literary rule of threes, that says that such fables or anecdotes or jokes will very often give a mere three examples, in order to show progression, or raise suspense, or set up the punchline, and then at the third there is a payoff of some kind, and somebody learns a lesson or gets their comeuppance or something.
But as I mentioned before, this was a somewhat gullible badger, and as I also mentioned before that "somewhat gullible" bit was intentionally generous phrasing on our part, for the badger in our story was undoubtedly as dumb as a fencepost and twice as set in his ways, and a mere three instances of being shown to be a fool and the laughingstock of his county was hardly going to dampen the resolve of such a foolish creature.
And so, as remarkable as it may sound, the badger simply continued his journey as if nothing untoward had happened, still as convinced of the magic-ness and bean-ness of his prize as he had been from the start. Not a bit of any of this had dented his beliefs or resolve in the slightest, as he strolled down the road, though it did make him quite peeved at the unconscionable rudeness of others. There is no arguing with a stubborn badger, you see, and no certainly no arguing with a stupid and bigoted badger. You may as well give up.
We therefore continue our journey with the somewhat gullible, at this point more-than-somewhat-irritable badger. We have to, in fact: the standard conventions of narration dictate that we cannot leave the aforementioned badger until the badger leaves his journey, no matter how tired of him we may have gotten, at this point.
Finally, the badger passed by the simple homestead of a not so simple fox. Yet again, the badger offered up his prize for inspection and presumed praise. "Look," the badger proclaimed haughtily. "I have purchased some magic beans -- the finest in the land." The fox looked, and his eyebrow raised.
As a result of the CIA's failure to firmly discredit the document text it received in February 2002, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was called in to investigate the claim. That decision eventually led to the special counsel's investigation that exposed inner workings of the White House and ended with the criminal conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was forced to resign as chief of staff to Vice President Cheney.
"My dear badger, surely you must know that those are not beans." The fox was an old and well traveled fox, and well versed in the ways of badgers and other animals, and not particularly interested in taking guff from any of them. He was the very fox, in fact, that faced down the polecat three counties down -- you know the one I mean, the one that had gone rabid, it was in all the papers at the time -- and while, like all foxes, he was perfectly willing to be polite about it, his arched eyebrow spoke of a certain distain of both dim badgers and rabid polecats. Not that our badger friend would pick up on such things, though he got the general tone well enough, I think.
"They most certainly are," said the badger. "I realize that not many animals are as clever as I at recognizing magical legumes, but I am quite skilled in the matter."
At this point, you may be quite put out at me for bringing you this far into the story, introducing talking animals, describing their manner of dress, asserting the presence of a modestly agrarian and quite civilized society of rabbits, voles, foxes, weasels and other animals all living together in relative harmony, only to now have your suspension of disbelief so thoroughly shattered by the rather far-fetched premise that such a dunderheaded badger would know the word legumes, much less be able to use it in a sentence.
To this I can only reply that badgers, in addition to the aforementioned gullibility, prejudice, and stubbornness, are masterful at the art of talking points.
One badger can give another badger a simple fax of terms and phrases and arguments, either sensible or ones entirely made up on the spot, like "flopwaffery" or "cheesebuggery" or "biggest tax increase in history," and that badger will thereafter be able to quote those terms and phrases and arguments back to you verbatim, right down to the last comma, for years afterwards. And that badger will teach other badgers, too, so that the same frequently nonsensical words spread like wildfire throughout their towns and villages. It is truly uncanny, and more than a little unnerving, which largely explains why, while other animals generally live together in peace in this bucolic agrarian paradise, badgers tend to keep to their own kind more than most.
So we can only surmise that some other badger, somewhere at the start of his journey, made note to our badger that magic beans were legumes, and our badger was so impressed with this tidbit that he downright insisted to himself that he was going to use the word somewhere, at some opportunity, and that was that. Now let us continue the story where we left off, which is with badger and fox in what is about to become a quite heated conversation.
"No," said the fox, quite certain on the matter himself, and having the benefit of ample experience on his side. "They are not magic beans. They are not magic, and they are not beans. You are holding rabbit droppings, quite clearly and unambiguously and, I might add, tightly."
"Hogwash!" shouted the badger.
"No, listen to me. They are rabbit droppings. You are holding a handful of rabbit poop."
Still the badger protested, but the fox persisted as well. "I am telling you this as clearly as I can. You are holding rabbit shit. Your paws, the ones right there in front of you, are clutching earnestly onto the excrement of a rabbit. You can smell it. You can see it. You can note that the pellets are, after this long in your sweaty paws, already 'making their own gravy', to put it succinctly. You are smearing yourself with feces, pure and simple, and I urge you for the sake of your own standing in society to put the damned things down already."
After a great deal of this and a few more sentences besides, the badger was getting irritable beyond his words to express, having already used up the word legumes and being more than a little furious that that particular hard-won word had not ended the debate right then and there. He was furious with the fox, more furious than he had been with the rabbits and voles, or the weasel, or even the prissy and obnoxious French pig, and at long last, he lost what little control of his senses a somewhat gullible badger normally might have.
"After listening to your prattling, I am quite certain that your wife, who I see there through the window, put you up to this nonsense. I am going to go into your house and bite her, to teach you both a lesson about lying to clever badgers like myself." And he did just that -- rather inexplicably to be sure. But he entered the fox's house, and bit his wife on the leg, rather hard, and then scurried back outside the house, outside the gate, and down the road, mentally applauding himself and leaving both foxes at a bit of a loss as to what precisely had just happened.
That was the last incident of the somewhat gullible badger's trip. What happened then, we all know, and it is hardly necessary to dwell much on it. He returned home to his own village, his proclaimed magic beans in paw, and re-proclaimed their magic-ness and bean-ness to the other badgers of the community. And he served, to the elders of his community, magic bean sandwiches, upon which the badgers got very sick, because eating rabbit crap is not a good thing to do, especially in the olden days when plagues were rampant and medicines had not advanced much beyond a few herbal remedies of marginal efficacy. So sure enough, the illness gave rise to a larger plague in the community and around the countryside, and when all was said and done, over three thousand of the badger's fellow villagers had died, cruelly and painfully, and hundreds of thousands of other animals throughout the countryside died in a similar horrific manner, and the whole scene was so terrible that it made Watership Down look like a Strawberry Shortcake birthday special.
The badger, however, learned nothing from this. He continued to believe, even as the bodies piled up in the streets, that his beans had indeed been quite magical, and that if anything the problem was that the magic had not been allowed sufficient time to work yet, and when it did work, watch out -- all would work out smartly, to be sure. He alternated between this and the belief that perhaps the magic had failed to work at all because of all the animals who had badmouthed his beans, which as everyone knows will weaken the power of magic beans considerably.
And that was that. There is no more to the story; it ends there.
Of course I realize that I have failed in one important regard, here, which is that this story is, despite how it was advertised, probably not entirely suitable for children. I can only plea for leniency, as the subject matter itself tends to dictate suitability or unsuitability: when you are presenting a story about a fundamentally stupid badger who bought rabbit shit, paraded it paws-extended around the countryside, refused to listen to the warnings as to its true nature given by all of the other animals, then who finally served his own village shit sandwiches au jus, leading to the deaths of an uncountable number of others, it is difficult to make a child-friendly story out of any of it.
It is still considerably less gruesome than the actual events, however, so perhaps it is the best we can do.