From time to time I get an article in the mail from my brother regarding Joseph Cirincione. Mr. Cirincione's has been talking up the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's recently released study "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications", an indispensable probe of perhaps the most serious blunder of the Bush Administration. Eight months ago he sat for an interview with Frontline on the topic of Missile Defense. Some interesting tidbits:

I spent about 10 months of my life investigating the performance of the Patriot missile in the Gulf War, and found out that it hit few, if any, Scuds. The basic agreement, among all the independent studies that have looked at it, is that it hit between zero and four Scuds out of about 44 that it tried to intercept.

But when the Patriot seemed to work, when we had that first briefing from Riyadh that, for the first time in combat, a ballistic missile had been intercepted -- a claim that was later proven to be incorrect, but everybody thought it was true at the time -- well, missile defense stocks literally and figuratively rose dramatically. The perceived success of the Patriot was worth about a billion dollars for the SDI program that year. It jumped from a $3 billion appropriation to a $4 billion appropriation.

Then-Secretary of Defense Cheney came to Congress and testified that this shows that missile defense can work. President Bush made the famous claims then that 43 of 45 Scuds have been intercepted and destroyed -- a claim that's later proven to be completely wrong -- but nonetheless everybody thought it was true. Everybody thought that missile defense could work. So it gave the whole program, theater and strategic missile defense, a new lease on life, and cost us billions of dollars more in research and programs that still haven't proved to be viable.

As with the commentary following the O'Neill revelations (consistently boiled down to a plaintive, almost maudlin query: "Will any of this make any difference?"), you can almost hear the exasperated sigh. Sighing is good, though. One must remember to breathe in between concussive slams against the proverbial brick wall.