Earlier this week, Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq survey group, which is in charge of looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, ended the search saying that it “has been exhausted.”

I know there has been more to the war in Iraq than just WMDs. But around the beginning of the time of the war, WMDs were all the craze of the pro-war people. Once they discovered there probably weren’t any there, the atmosphere changed slightly – to “We need to get rid of Saddam because he is evil” and “We need to give democracy to the Iraqis.”

Let’s take a look at these arguments. Saddam Hussein, as leader of Iraq, wasn’t exactly the nicest guy on the planet. He was clearly land hungry and had already tried to take over Kuwait. He killed tens of thousands of his own people, and he would not let weapons inspectors in on a consistent basis.

Giving democracy to the Iraqis isn’t such a bad argument either. Under Saddam’s regime, the Iraqis were oppressed. There were many restrictions against women, and different religious sects were oppressed as well.

Both of these arguments are pretty obvious. It would be hard to argue that Saddam was a good guy, or that the Iraqis weren’t oppressed. But then why did Bush and the rest of the White House use weapons of mass destruction as the centerpiece of their argument when it was less solid, in that it could turn out that there weren’t any?

If from the start they had said, “We need to give democracy to the oppressed Iraqis,” the nation would have responded with something like, “Yeah, then we probably should invade every other country where the government is oppressive and install democracy. Oh wait… that’s a lot of countries” and that’s simply not feasible.

People wouldn’t have been too enthusiastic about taking their children and spouses and putting them in harm’s way to free some people they didn’t know from oppression.

However, when you go around telling people to put duct tape on your windows, shouting that today’s color is orange instead of blue and saying that these people have nuclear weapons and could use them on us at any minute … things start to get crazy.

If the government or the media tells people that there is an imminent apocalyptic threat, people get frightened. I wasn’t scared though; luckily, I still had my bomb shelter and canned food supply from Y2K.

But the rest of the country I guess had either scrapped their supply or had never gotten any in the first place (I have no idea why), so most felt the need to do something else about it, which eventually resulted in “go to war.”

Someone could have said, “They’re just duping us into going to war to fulfill their hidden agenda – by using shady scare tactics and a pure blanket of fear” and at the time, they probably would have been labeled a conspiracy theorist. That view is becoming more and more accurate, however, depending on whether you believe there really was WMD intelligence failure or not.

In the world’s greatest democracy, I am disgusted that our government has resorted to rule by fear. Does the government really believe that its citizens are so childlike and immature that it has to scare us into doing things instead of giving us good reasons? By the way, the color alert right now is code yellow or “elevated risk.” Watch out!

The unfortunate thing is that we really can’t do anything about it now, except calculate the odds that we probably got shafted. I’d give it about an 80 percent chance we did.

But the lesson of the day remains: don’t let the government or the media scare you; take things rationally and logically and always demand proof.