Pick, pick, pick.

The media nit of the moment is that the president fibbed in his State of the Union address about Saddam’s purchase of uranium from Niger to further the Iraq nuclear weapons program.

Yeah, sure, it’s troublesome (imagine, a president lying to us). But how safe, to get all high-minded and concerned NOW, to rail at being “misled” – now that it’s all over but the quagmire.

When the president was “building his case for war,” were we the O.J. jurors, preselected for our ignorance, sequestered from common sense, privy only to the highly selective information tidbits the prosecutor fed us? Under those circumstances, a whopper like the Niger tale might, in retrospect, matter.

But, come on, the case for war had always been transparently trumped up; it was about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s threat to the United States as much as it was about Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda, which is to say, not at all. Pretty much all of Europe was able to see that.

The current fuss over 16 words in the State of the Union address leaves the impression that we invaded Iraq reluctantly, to correct a problem recently brought to our attention (regrettably, through faulty intelligence). But the fact is, the administration’s empire strategists had been planning this war for more than a decade. Recent developments had nothing to do with it. Their agenda were pure Hollywood.

For instance, the 2000 Project for the New American Century, which stems from earlier documents written at the end of the Cold War (when the big dilemma America’s military establishment faced was maintaining Cold War-level defense spending now that the justification for it was gone), calls for a huge U.S. military presence around the world as “the cavalry on the new American frontier.”

And one of the report’s co-chairs, Donald Kagan, has remarked: “You saw the movie ‘High Noon’? We’re Gary Cooper.”

This group of people, including Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, have long envisioned a world that bends to America’s military might, belying George Bush’s campaign promise to pursue “a humble foreign policy.” He never had any such intention.

Our invasion of Iraq opened like that scene in “Red River,” where every cowboy whoops and waves his hat as the cattle drive begins. The country’s passion for it was aroused by countless half-baked presidential utterances about lethal viruses, shadowy terrorist networks and Sept. 11 hijackers armed – next time – by Saddam Hussein.

The Bush team, pursuing an agenda of American dominance, sold us a convenient villain and a stupid historical rationale. Head ’em up, move ’em out! We’re goin’ to Munich! (Remember?)

Those who came on board only after learning about the Niger uranium connection are fewer in number than beret-clad doppelgangers in Baghdad. While a lie is a lie, and every lie undergirding the disingenuous “war on terror” deserves to be outed, the media’s obsessive focus on this small detail of the grand fraud that has left us bleeding $4 billion (and several dozen servicemen) a month is excruciating. The question that matters is, where are we headed next?

I mean, it matters in the sense that we’re a democracy, the core definition of which is that the direction we take as a country is determined by the will of the citizenry.

Do we want to pursue the so-called “Pax Americana” and rule the world, strategizing for endless preemptive war, developing new generations of nuclear weapons and militarizing outer space; or do we want to re-establish the alliances the Bush team has trashed, strengthen the United Nations, nurture fledgling democracies on a foundation of global justice and use our vast resources and influence to promote basic human rights for every citizen of Planet Earth?

Election 2004 – yahoo! Let the debate begin.

Robert Koehler is an editor at Tribune Media Services.