Bush Vows War Over Iraqi Pets
December 11, 2002
By Jerome Doolittle

WASHINGTON, DC. FEBRUARY 16, 2003 - The long-awaited invasion of Iraq moved closer today with the revelation that Saddam is holding hostage thousands of household pets belonging to the Evil One's top weapons experts.

The experts themselves, along with their extended families and especially close friends, defected early this month to the United States, where they entered the witness protection program. Even under intense debriefing in undisclosed locations, however, all denied that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called their denials "incontrovertible proof that Saddam is lying through these poor guys' teeth."

Weapons of Mass Destruction must exist in Iraq, Rumsfeld explained, because top U.S. officials just know they do. Among these officials are Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz, White House spokeperson Ari Fleischer, and the president himself. None of them has ever told a lie.

"Here we've got hundreds of Iraqi weapons experts parroting the same ridiculous story even after they're safe in the free world," Rumsfeld said. "Plainly Saddam still has their collective asses hammered into some kind of collective crack."

White House spokesperson Fleischer credited the President himself with figuring out exactly what that "crack" was:

"The president was feeding Spot last night, which is incidentally a really, really cute thing to watch," Fleischer said. (Spot, an English Springer Spaniel, is one of two Bush family dogs. The other is Barney, a black Scottie.) "The president holds a pretzel out on his tongue and that little rascal Spot licks it right off. Usually.

"Just then it suddenly occurred to the president, and don't think there aren't plenty of red faces over at Langley because they totally missed it, that if the president of the United States loves his Spot, why shouldn't an Iraqi weapons expert love his Ramadan or whatever they call dogs in Moslem."

The president promptly assembled his foreign policy team and announced, "What the hell, guys and gal, Arabs are human people, too. People beings just like us, or sort of, anyway. More or less at least, maybe lesser. They're not going to mess with a guy that's got his hands on Fluffy and Rover, any more than you would or me too."

At the president's direction United States ambassador to the United Nations John D. Negroponte yesterday delivered to the Security Council a demand that Saddam Hussein immediately turn over to U.N. weapons inspectors all pets belonging to the defectors.

Asked at today's Pentagon briefing whether Saddam could possibly ensure that no pet was left behind, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said, "Who cares, they're only animals. Look, the important thing here is that first we say we've got a list of every single pet only we won't show it to him, okay?

"Then when he coughs up the stupid pets, we say he's holding out on us. At that point we have no option but to invade the lying prick and next thing you know Thomas Jefferson is president of the United States of Iraq and pretty soon everybody turns into Mormons and Lutherans and shit."

Secretary Rumsfeld went on to announce plans to deploy the First Air Cavalry Division in defensive positions around Mecca, a city in Saudi Arabia where there is a big black rock called the Cupola.