the US always have someone like this. What was the name of the guy that the US was so strenuously interested in catching in Somalia?
what's strange is that the US elite seems to believe its own propaganda a lot of the time. Instead of figuring out what was really going on in Somalia, they strove to catch the Mr. Big _du jour_. The same seems to be happening in Iraq, with Zarqawi. Iraq seems to be Somalia writ large. (A better analogy than Vietnam redux, though no analogy is ever perfect.)
Similarly, it sometimes seems that the elite thinks the recent "election" in Iraq was real.
-- Jim Devine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.