A while ago I made my own case about why our intelligence community could not come forth with everything they knew, but rather needed to keep the secrets to use either for evaluating Iraqi "disclosures", or for eventual military targeting use. "Jane Galt" (the illustrious Megan McArdle) referrs us to this article on the same topic.

A friend made a point yesterday about the Iraqi situation. An obvious, wise point. "They want a smoking gun?" What's wrong with that? "A smoking gun is one which has already been fired. We don't want to find one of those."

In this case, the "smoking gun" most refer to is the something along the lines of those which touched off the Cuban missle crisis. Do we really want to replay the Cuban missle crisis with Saddam playing Castro and Israel and Europe playing the southern United States?