More on the Weapons Front

I discovered this site via Mary's a couple of weeks ago--it's now a regular staple of my reading diet.

The Difference
From The Washington Post:

In an interview Tuesday night with President Bush, ABC correspondent Diane Sawyer asked why the administration stated as a "hard fact" that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had such weapons when it appears now he only had the intent to acquire them.

"So what's the difference?" Bush responded. "The possibility that he could acquire weapons. If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger. That's what I'm trying to explain to you."

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Diane Sawyer is to be forgiven for her inability to understand. Once again, our President is showing uncommon leadership, this time in the field of mathematics. In asserting the lack of a difference between "lots of weapons" and "no weapons," Bush is opening a new frontier in number theory, so it's no wonder that Bush left Sawyer in the theoretical dust.

Let's examine the advances being made here, taking as an example the "500 tons of sarin gas" that Bush once claimed Saddam was brewing up. Traditional , old-school math would suggest this formula:

500 tons of sarin > 0 tons of sarin

Reasonable to the untutored, perhaps even intuitively correct. But the new Bush math comes to a different, bolder conclusion:

500 tons of sarin = 0 tons of sarin

This may be counterintuitive, but the derivation is sound. I'd love to give you the actual formulae that were used to derive this startling advance, but the relevant papers have been sealed by the Vice President's office "for reasons of national security." Rest assured, however, this is rock-solid stuff.

I think it's been noted before, but once more: there is quite a degree of difference between the possibility of something happening, and the fact that something actually happened. I'm reminded of this difference almost every time I see someone whom I find attractive, although I'd give bonus points to anyone who told me that my chances were "about as good as the possibility of Saddam getting his hands on 500 tons of sarin."

So--maybe some other time, then?