Saddam vs. the ED-209

Also in the April 13 press conference, President Bush repeated this characterization of the decision to invade Iraq:

The United Nations passed a Security Council resolution unanimously that said, disarm or face serious consequences. And he refused to disarm.

This description portrays the decision to invade Iraq as something conditional to that country's actions — something that might have been avoided and a decision that had not yet been reached even in early 2003.

But as Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke have pointed out, and as Bob Woodward's new book further demonstrates, the decision to go to war was made well before the resolution Bush refers to was put to a vote.

I was also surprised to hear, months after the chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay's declaration that "we were wrong" about Iraq's armaments, the president still talking about Iraq's refusal to "disarm."

In January 2003, as weapons inspectors were coming up empty at each of the "known" weapons sites that American intelligence indicated, I wrote that this insistence on "disarmament" reminded me of a scene from the 1987 movie Robocop.

After 16 more months of inspections finding more of the same nothing President Bush continues to talk about Iraq's failure to disarm. The scene from Robocop seems more relevant than ever:

[The scene] occurs high in the offices of the evil Omni Consumer Products (a sort of privatized Department of Homeland Security). They have just unveiled their latest product, the ED-209, a tanklike law-enforcement robot.

To demonstrate the robot's effectiveness in battling crime and maintaining "domestic security," a junior executive is asked to pretend to threaten the ED-209 with a handgun. The young man picks up the gun and gamely points it at the ED-209. The robot's dual-machine guns point menacingly at the man and it intones, "Warning: You have 15 seconds to disarm …"

Everyone chuckles at the machine's threatening aspect and the man obediently places the handgun on the conference table and steps away.

"You have 10 seconds to disarm …" the robot says. The man, weaponless and unable to comply with further demands to disarm, attempts to flee as the war-machine continues its inevitable, reflexive count-down. Then it opens fire with both barrels in an impressive display of military might and unnecessary overkill.