“Missing Links Found,” screams William Safire, confirming what my daddy told me long ago: you can always fool people who wish to be fooled. What

a crock. If Douglas Feith has any real evidence that Saddam’s spy agency and al-Qaeda were in bed together, Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

Who do these neo-“Mac, Leroy, and José, you do the fighting and dying, we’ll do the talking”-cons take us for? Complete dupes like those patsies in the White House who fell for their WMD bull? If Saddam and Osama were partners in crime, Ahmad Chalabi was never a bank swindler. Mind you, the neocons need to dupe us at every turn. They’re the ones who got us into this mess in the first place, so they’re not about to do a mea culpa. To the contrary. They have an agenda, and to hell with the truth, the facts, and whatever else stands in their way. Ergo the “sensational” revelation that Saddam and Osama were playing footsie. If close to 500 of our young soldiers had not been needlessly butchered, this would be a joke on a par with those hilarious Clintonian denials of wrongdoing. But our boys not only continue to die, now their bodies are also being desecrated à la Somalia. The cynicism of the Sofa Samurai is truly breathtaking.

Puffy John Podhoretz, who has been known to flirt with danger when devouring cream pies, dismisses the number of dead and horribly mangled as insignificant compared to Vietnam. Yes, Puffy, they are, but give it time and they will not be. Podhoretz, incidentally, qualified his statement by announcing that he had not served in the army. Gee, thanks, and here I thought you were a Silver Star winner and a volunteer to boot. Puffy recently referred to John Kerry as a Congressional Medal of Honor winner. No one pointed out to him that that was another Kerrey, head of the New School and a onetime boyfriend of Debra Winger, for which, as far as I’m concerned, he deserved a second medal.

As Paul Craig Roberts has reported, neocons are using their presidential appointments to manipulate the intelligence services. “Neo-con media and think tanks aided and abetted the deceit.” Roberts goes on to say how the neocon agenda is to ensure a greater Israel while pretending to impose democracy in the Middle East. Writing and issuing untruths in order to serve Ariel Sharon’s plans is a given. Ditto where the Weekly Standard, or Weekly Sharon, is concerned. William Kristol, in cahoots with Douglas Feith and as big a bull artist, publishes the rubbish, and presto, the next thing we know it’s a fact. Like the weapons of mass destruction, and the 45 minutes before Saddam was going to hit Britain with them. Once upon a time we had Lenin’s “useful idiots.” Now we have Trotsky’s. All these neocons are Trotskyists in reality, and they let it slip out once in awhile. Don’t be fooled, dear readers. If the neocons are conservatives, I’m Monica Lewinsky. Feith and Frum, Puffy Poddy, and Kristol, what a cabal of lunch-bucket pilferers and smiling wallet-lifters!

And to think decent men like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took them at their word. If Bush ends up being a one-term president, look for Kristol to lay the blame on the president’s reluctance to listen to people like Wolfowitz to bomb and invade more Arab countries.

Here are the un-Kristolized and un-Feithed facts: even the most boneheaded warmonger must surely see that things are going badly wrong in Iraq. I will not gloat because of our dead and maimed, but this magazine unequivocally stated that we would win the war in a jiffy and most likely lose the peace. It is a disaster born of arrogance. We have overthrown Saddam, who had far less to do with the attack of 9/11 than, say, Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, and have succeeded in turning Iraq into what it was not before —the center of anti-Western terrorism.

In 1994, the cowardly Bill Clinton played tough guy and forced Raoul Cedras from power in Haiti. His “democratic” replacement, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is now a tyrant far worse than Cedras ever was. If Uncle Sam cannot manage a joke country like Haiti, how will he fix Iraq, an artificial construct of 25 million in which people of different tribes and with different religious beliefs were yoked together by the British early in the last century? Spin and bull aside, Iraq is shattered, broken, and divided, weaker than it was before and more unstable. Neocon ideologues and an inexperienced president are to blame.Long after Vietnam, Americans continued to be drawn into conflicts with people we do not understand. Most of them have ended badly. Lebanon, Somalia, certainly Kosovo, where Albanian drug dealers and thugs rule, and Muslim fanatics await to pounce on Christian countries like Greece and Italy. Now Turkey is in the middle of it. It’s time someone called a halt to this madness.