Remember Me? I'm a Friggin' Missile

Saddam Hussein shown holding Iraq's only working gun. Also, the nation's goofiest hat!

With each passing day, more and more Americans resign themselves to the thought of impending war. In fact, we've basically stopped preparing for war with Iraq and started looking more closely at North Korea. We tend to think of the war with Iraq as being over already. Hell, we won it once, there's no reason to think we're not going to win it again. Iraq isn't really much of a country. It's basically Saddam, his cabinet, and a whole bunch of really scared Arabs running around and starving to death. Someone should tell them they'd starve to death a little slower if they didn't wear themselves out running around. The point is, Iraq doesn't offer much in the way of an enemy. North Korea, on the other hand, there's a country worth worrying about. They have nuclear capabilities and they seem to be convinced that they're far enough away from us that they could use them and not suffer any real consequences. These guys are itching to fight. They'll take any excuse they can get to start shooting people. You can't send them a birthday card without it being declared an act of war by their council of most honorable elders, or whoever calls the shots over there. Frankly, I think they're getting a little cocky for people with only half a country. We may have to go in there and smack them around a little until they learn that if the name of your nation includes a cardinal direction, you're not big enough to rumble with the U.S.

My thoughts had been on North Korea for some time, with little regard for Iraq, until this article caught my eye.

Iraq 'forgot' about rocket warheads

IRAQ has denied eleven rocket warheads designed to carry chemical agents are part of a secret arms program.

A United Nations team found the warheads at an Iraqi ammunition depot overnight, but a senior Iraqi official denied that they were chemical weaponry or banned.

General Amin, whose agency liaises with the inspectors, said: "It is neither chemical, neither biological. It is empty warheads. It is small artillery rockets. It is expired rockets, and they were forgotten without any intention to use them."

"They found out some ... boxes, but they are unopened boxes, sealed boxes, and they asked to open those boxes," General Amin said.

I'm sorry, could you run that by me one more time? They forgot about eleven warheads that were built for the specific purpose of carrying chemical weapons? That's not something you forget. The formula for computing the volume of a rhombus, that's something you forget. At first I was against the war with Iraq, then I grudgingly accepted its inevitability and started focusing on other issues. Now I think we should go in there and spank them silly just on sheer principle! Where does Iraq, one of the most easily and frequently bitchslapped nations in the world, get the balls to say that they "forgot" about eleven warheads? After all the years that Iraq worked to keep out U.N. inspectors, to then uncover something like this just sitting in boxes is more than a little insulting. Come on, Iraq! You've had all this time to hide your warheads, and the best hiding place you could come up with was "sealed boxes?" For shame!

And since when was "we forgot" an acceptable excuse in international politics? If they said they were going to send Bush a free t-shirt and never did, I'd let them get away with "we forgot." Having eleven warheads stashed in a closest, that's not forgettable material. Iraq has to have some nerve to have weapons laying around like that and try to blame it on a brain fart. What are we supposed to say to that? Do they expect us to say it's okay? "Oh, they just forgot about the chemical weapon-delivering warheads they said they didn't have. Hey, it happens to the best of us, don't worry about it." Then next week we find out that they "forgot" about a laboratory deep within the earth where horrible experiments are being conducted to create a race of superintelligent, hermaphroditic gorillas and -BAM! - there's a damn dirty shemale ape planting an Iraqi flag on top of the Capitol Hill. No, we can't let them squeak by with a flimsy excuse like that. Can you imagine history if America considered "we forgot" to be a useable diplomatic strategy?

Franklin Roosevelt: "Say, Adolf, I heard something about you killing six million Jews. You don't have any death camps, do you?"
Hitler: "Uh... no."
Roosevelt: "What about those camps over there?"
Hitler: "Oh, those death camps! Yeah, sorry, I forgot."
Roosevelt: "Hey, don't worry about it. It's cool."

John F. Kennedy: "Khrushchev, my guys are telling me there are some crazy silo-looking things in Cuba."
Khrushchev: "Dude, there totally aren't. I don't know what your guys are talking about.".
Kennedy: "Look, I have these pictures that show missile silos and I think.... yep, they're in Cuba."
Khrushchev: "Oh, snap! Yeah, we do have silos there. I forgot. My bad."
Kennedy: "Hey, no biggie."

You'll bring this on yourselves! Pretty scary stuff. If forgetfulness was a good excuse in those scenarios, today we'd be living in a Jew-less, post-apocalyptic Commie world. And without Jews, who would host the post-apocalyptic Commie Oscars? Not Billy Crystal, he'd be dead. That's right. Whoopi Goldberg. Every year. I wouldn't want to live in that world, would you? That's why we have to send a message to the Iraqis to get them to stop digging their hole any deeper. Luckily, I was in a message-sending mood, so I put together the following note: Dear Iraq, Think back to the Gulf War. I've seen tennis matches that lasted longer than you guys did once we sent in ground troops. You're not going to win this one. If I were in your position, I'd be writing letters asking America to make the ass-kicking swift and relatively painless. Instead, you're just making it worse for yourselves. It's bad enough that we found the warheads. You'll definitely get a good, solid bombing for that. But saying that you forgot about them? Now you're just being a dick. If there's one thing that you should understand about American foreign policy, it's that no one gets to be a dick but us. If we say we'll stay out of your airspace, and the next day you spot the 162nd B-52 bomber squadron doing barrel rolls over Baghdad, we get to say, "oops, we forgot." That's the privilege we earned by whooping a lot of tail in a lot of wars. If our President gets drunk and moons your prime minister, it's too bad, because we're America. We can get away with that sort of crap. No one else can, especially you. Love, America P. S., Especially you. Now, I don't pretend to understand the minds of foreign diplomats - except for that one time when I pretended to understand the minds of foreign diplomats, but I learned my lesson from that - but I think that this letter will get the point across. Having warheads is bad. Having warheads and lying about them is worse. Having warheads, lying about them, and then coming up with a lame excuse to cover your asses is just asking for it. Aww Shit, Here Come The Sizaints! Taylor "Psoriasis or something like that" Bell here let you know that I have stopped living in sin and begun living every moment of my life to glorify God. I used to be a filthy nonbeliever, but then I played Saints of Virtue, which changed my mind about the existence of God, since the developers have apparently used their holy Christian powers to go back in time and steal an early prealpha build of the Doom engine to use in their game. This is a Christian game, so instead of fighting evil imps who are bent on keeping you from saving your comrades in a moon base you�re fighting different sins (represented by giant floating masks with five frames of animation each) who are heinously trying to prevent you from swearing your life over to Jesus and immediately racing down the street to make a bunch of large tax-deductible donations to your nearest church. From the front they all look pretty much the same, but each mask has a different item jammed into the back � Vanity has a deformed boxing glove, Worldliness has a globe (Get it? Worldliness?), Self-Righteousness has a Mozart-style wig and Fear has a rusty discolored bowling ball. They dissuade you from giving your life to Christ in a very effective and persuasive way � by floating around in hallways and spitting tiny little fireballs at you. The first time one of those things hit me, I felt all my love for God drain right out of my body before being replaced with a new desire to spraypaint a chicken casserole recipe on my local church�s wall in really big pink letters. I�m not exactly sure why I felt that way or why I decided to tell you all about it, but don�t question me � I know where you live and I�ve still got some spraypaint left, fucker. Read the full review before I use my newfound God powers to smite your pagan ass.

– Ben "Greasnin" Platt