Saddam trying to buy yellowcake? Well, that's what Joe Wilson reported to the CIA when he was debriefed after his infamous trip. Wilson was basing his words on the ex-premier of Nigeria.

Link

That's a sample. But to be more helpful you need to further define what it is that you disagree with.

But nothing stays clear for long when it comes to the justification for the Iraq war. Even since Kay's seminal testimony there have been attempts to reinterpret what he actually said. The media has been accused of focusing on a single soundbite, ignoring the ISG's findings that the Iraqis had indeed been trying to develop long-range missiles they were not entitled to, and had the means to reconstitute their weapons programmes once the international pressure was off.......

"There were continuing clandestine activities but increasingly driven more by corruption than driven by purposeful directed weapons programmes," argued the 63-year-old former diplomat and sleuth. "

Link

My point was and remains. The net result was that no WMD's were found, but there us no doubt that Saddam wanted to get back into the business, and it makes no difference if some of it was driven by corruption. In fact, that is worse, because Saddam might have become too concerned to give/sell them, though I doubt that. But corrupt operations are driven by money.

ppj is not able to concentrate on anything that has more depth than soundbites and faux news talking points, so reading Juan Cole's writing is out of the question for him. He embraces the fantasy world that is currently in vogue with our dear leader.

From Ron Suskind:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

 The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Yes Juan Cole is in the reality-based community as well. He writes history based on  a judicious study of discernible reality. Hitchens, Pipes, and other neocons have discarded that idea as one belonging to the 'old world', a quaint concept of the past currently embraced by losers, that is losers defined by their, um... er.. creative powers of deception.

Juan Cole has studied the ME for years. In years pasts Monks and priests studied the bible for years to debate the issue of how many angels could dance on the head of a needle.

So I don't challenge his efforts, I just recognize his bias, and I don't find his conclusions very accurate.

Here's a quote from a source that you will consider biased:

And why would it be interested in a rumor-mongering attack dog (he once accused Dan Senor, the media spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority, of being an Israeli agent and claimed that Senor had ordered the U.S. military to attack Muqtada al-Sadr in order to serve Israeli interests) whose idea of a good source is Lyndon La Rouche's former middle east correspondent?

Link

Note that I acknowledge the bias of the link. But I also find the underlined sentence to be very instructive about Cole's research efforts.

aw, the nice thing about being an Independent, as uncomfortable as it can be to be in "no man's land" with no supporters on the side, is that I can read and note the biases of the author and pck out, sometimes, something that I see as truthful.

I do not defend the WOT because someone has told me it is good, but because in my life experiences and in my reading and considerations, I see no way that we can do anything but fight and win, or not fight an loose.