A surge in Iraq gasbags

With the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq upon us, it seems to be generally agreed by most experts that the "surge" is working, that despite continuing casualties, we have at last reached a "turning point." This is certainly the view of George W. ("Mission accomplished!") Bush, Donald ("Stuff happens") Rumsfeld, Dick ("The streets of Baghdad are sure to erupt with joy") Cheney, Bill ("Military action will not last more than a week") O'Reilly and Condoleezza ("We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud") Rice.

But the above are all partisan voices. As far as we are aware -- and, as founders of the Institute of Expertology, we are experts on the matter -- until now no impartial institution has undertaken a comprehensive survey of experts on the war in Iraq. Therefore, our institute has taken it on itself to conduct such an inquiry.

For those who may have been too young to see, or are too old to remember, our original study, "The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation" (1984), we recall that notwithstanding the best efforts of our worldwide cadre of researchers, we were unable to identify a single expert who was right.

At the time, despite those findings, our scholarly integrity compelled us to concede the statistical probability that, in theory, the experts might be right as much as half the time. It was simply that we hadn't found any.

Our new study of the Iraq war, titled "Mission Accomplished! Or How We Won the War in Iraq," is a different matter. We can state without fear of contradiction that never before in the history of institute surveys has there been such a dramatic consensus among experts -- those who, by virtue of official status, academic standing, formal title, mastery of jargon and/or number of publications, are presumed to know what they are talking about.

They all seemed to agree that:

* The link between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks was (to quote New York Times columnist William Safire) an "undisputed fact."

* Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. ("Only a fool, or possibly a Frenchman, would think otherwise": Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.)

* The cost of war would be cheap at the price. ("We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction": then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.)