We have it on good authority (actually, a friend of a friend of a cousin twice-removed) that the White House was itching like a tick-ridden hound to find a link between the terrorist attacks of 11 September to Iraq. Our authority stated that even if a definitive link couldn’t be found, one should be made up so that the US could finger Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Okay, now much has been made about a meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer and one of the hijackers that supposedly took place in Prague. Pretty much everyone has debunked that story, but it got me thinking: if the Iraqis hand their dark-skinned hands in the terrorist attacks, what else could they be possibly involved in?

Think about all the very bizarre events that have occured in America during the last couple of years and remember, this is a country that is as bland as mother’s milk. Nothing really of interest happens here at all. Yet I seem to recall that in the summer of the 2001, America’s east coast was ravaged up and down by a series of shark attacks. Unheard of, unprovoked, unrelenting shark attacks.

At first I thought it was yet another communist plot emanating from Cuba, that repressive bastion of out-of-date Army fatigues and failed ideology. It would be the perfect revenge of Fidel Castro for the Bay of Pigs. But then the disappearance of Chandra Levy, the attacks of September on the capital city of New York, and the rampant child abduction cases that ravaged a nation. Innocence lost? Oh yes, thanks undoubtedly to the evil Iraqi regime.

There had to be a thread in all of this. George Bush put it succinctly when at his Churchillian best (channeling in FDR for good measure), he labeled Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an axis of evil. And guess what? He had to be onto something, because lo and behold, North Korea admits that it does have a nuclear program. Iranians took the streets, ostensibly offended at being lumped into the axis of evil, but oblivious to the fact that their stringent denials of such only proves their culpability.

But no enemy proved as fierce or elusive as the Iraqis. Now, I don’t know where Baghdad is, but I’m sure that once we find it, we’ll be able to uncover the capital of the world’s foremost terrorist network. They’ve undoubtedly been busy since kicking out UN weapons inspectors in 1998, plotting to distract American intelligence efforts with shark attacks, Jewish interns and child abductions. All of these anomalies create economic jitters, which is precisely what the evil Iraqis want because the best way to attack America is to hit us where it counts: the wallet. Create instability and the Wall Street weaklings start crying like lost little girls, plunging the market into a freefall from which we still have to recover. All to the delight of the Iraqis, whose expertly plotted machinations seem to have paid off. It wouldn’t surprise me if the recent, massive oil spill off the coast of Spain (a country in Europe) wasn’t yet another covert Iraqi operation of mass distraction.

But no more. We know the Iraqis pose the greatest threat to international peace, and have America within their sights. Sure, Iraq has not had territorial integrity over its own country for over 10 years, and we’ve just recently started bombing radar installations after a decade of patiently asking the Iraqis not to violate the no-fly zone and such. Okay, so we quietly armed Iraq during its 8-year war with Iran (no doubt their co-conspirators!) and made business deals with the unjust dictator even after the 1991 Gulf War, but none of that matters. They are gunning for us! So, to follow the cues of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the quiet, eloquent Arizona sentor Jon Kyl, let us not be duped into believing that we need United Nations weapons inspectors to find anything because we know that the weapons of mass destruction are there. The unreasonableness of the UN’s reasonableness is reason enough to invade without waiting for reason after Iraq strikes again.

Besides, it’ll help the economy, right?