The depth of dissent is hard to gauge. Even if it turns out to be a minority view, which seems likely, the skepticism is significant given the image of consensus that Washington has projected and the political reliance the administration has come to place on the mobile units. At the recent summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Bush cited the trailers as evidence of illegal Iraqi arms.

Have you read that UN inspectors are back in Iraq? The US is allowing them to investigate the radioactive material that was taken from the Tuwaitha facility by looters. It was then dumped on the ground or otherwise unsafely discarded so that the containers it was stored in could be used for other things. We're requiring that the inspectors be accompanied at all times by soldiers in order to make sure that they restrict their activities to only investigating that material in particular, and we're limiting their stay to two weeks. Is it just me, or isn't it exactly this sort of monitoring and hindrance of UN inspectors that got Iraq into hot water in the first place? I have to laugh at the fact that now that we're in charge in Iraq we're putting exactly the same sorts of restrictions on the inspectors that Saddam Hussein did.