There is much ado about "weapons of mass destruction," the new shibboleth of renewed and ever seductive hatred of George W. Bush. More precisely, like the imaginary playmate of childhood, it is the absence of weapons of mass destruction that sends Democrats into dizzying fantasies of bringing down the President. You would think the Democrat leadership would be more alarmed at the possibility that Saddam secretly exported such weapons to Syria or, possibly, Iran, rather than harping, as has Senator Kerry, on the charge that Bush deliberately misled the public as to their existence.

For his enemies, the President has been chasing windmills but, unlike the benevolent figure of Quixote, the one cut out for Bush is sinister and full of dire motives. At the very least, it is hoped the President will be censured for having acted, in good faith, upon imperfect intelligence such as the forged documents claiming Niger would sell Iraq 500 tons of yellowcake, a colorful form of concentrated uranium ore. Bush pretty much asserted as much in his State of the Union speech last January. At worst, it is hoped Bush will be impeached because it will be proved that he always knew the intelligence was false and used it anyway to justify the invasion.

Did Bush know the intelligence was false when, in February of 2002 or eleven months before his State of the Union address, it was reported to the CIA to be false, as claimed by New York Times writer, Nicholas D. Kristof ? It would seem he had to know if Kristof is correct. Then, we either have to believe that Bush is as stupid as his enemies claim to risk his credibility so blatantly by relying on documentation known to be false for almost a year, or Bush believes the American people to be even more stupid than he and would never get wind of it. Bush's opposition finds either scenario plausible enough. For the rest of us, it is a difficult swim through the waters of hard reality.

On the other hand, before making his damning claim, Kristof offers, I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger.

He lends further hazy assurance with according to someone present at the meetings in which it was revealed that the intelligence was false. Should such a serious allegation go on hearsay? Will deposing Bush's "regime" rely on unsubstantiated citation? Surely there has been much more evidence to justify overthrowing the tyrant in Iraq. I certainly don't mean to quibble over differences between Bush and Saddam, but Kristof is playing the grapevine game of he said, she said at this point.

Just where is Deep Throat when you need him? Perhaps Kristof can give us a little more from the same source?

Instead, he gives us this.

Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's.

Mr. Kamel was once head of Saddam's biological weapons program. He defected in 1995. That is a good three years before President Clinton addressed the military on February 18, 1998 and stated that possible war with Iraq would be justifiable because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program. Clinton at the time rightfully said, [w]e have no business agreeing to any resolution of this that does not include free, unfettered access to the remaining sites by people who have integrity and proven competence in the inspection business.

Sound familiar? Didn't Bush urge the U.N. itself to have its own resolutions concerning Iraq honored by the dictator? Saddam was playing the shell game back then as well. Bush simply picked up the same hymnal from the previous administration and continued singing. Previously, Bush's enemies tried to implicate him by claiming he held a personal grudge against Saddam for attempting to assassinate his father. That didn't stick either. Now they're claiming he has deliberately misled the nation.

Clinton must have had the same intelligence during the time Mr. Kamel pooh-poohed the whole Saddam-has-WMD shtick. Can the American government please come up with some other carrot to justify American Imperialism in the eyes of the electorate? Only, in retrospect, it's all right if the Emperor is a Democrat.

Clinton again:

In this century we learned through harsh experience that the only answer to aggression and illegal behavior is firmness, determination and, when necessary, action," Clinton said. "In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals, who travel the world among us unnoticed.

"If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act with impunity," he said. (emphasis added)

Not quite Bush's "Axis of Evil" but it's close enough. Notice how "rogue" is not limited to the Republican lexicon. Clinton, to his credit, saw the danger. To his discredit, he did nothing about it after Madeleine Albright was booed at The Ohio State University for bringing Clinton's initiative to the public. Exhibiting the rot in American academia to be so thorough it has infected a "Big Ten" university in so-called Middle America, the students' near Nazi-rally cries of "racist war" foreclosed any opportunity for dialogue or discussion. The media coverage sealed the deal: no military strike against Saddam.

To be fair, September 11th changed all that for most Americans, except for those waiting for Bush to finally stumble, and that includes not only much of academia and the media elite but a large enough portion of the Democrat Party. Krisoff himself doesn't want to come off as callous about the liberation of the Iraqi people when he claims it was, in itself, the right thing to do. No one wants to throw a wet blanket on how it was justifiable to go in there after mass graves have been found.

Yet Kristof and his ilk won't discuss the larger picture as they nitpick over whatever presumed scraps have fallen from Bush's table. We can't even begin to discuss the strategy Bush is ambitiously pursuing: to bring democracy to the Middle East. The Iranian mullahs are feeling lonely now that their erstwhile enemy and ally, with whom they shared a deep hatred of the United States, has been permanently removed. It remains to be seen what happens in Iran, if democracy truly takes root there after the removal of the mullahs. But if Bush's strategy works, or comes close to working, the removal of Saddam Hussein would have been an indispensable part of that desired outcome.

Bringing democracy to the Middle East, however tall an order, is not the foremost concern of Bush's enemies. It is, rather, a credibility issue for Kristof and others who will do all they can to damage Bush. For them, Bush is a liar and much else. To what degree, though, is such an allegation valid? If hearsay of sources is enough for Kristof to claim Bush misled the nation, then why are verifiable sources of Clinton's urgent concern about Saddam's weapons program and Clinton's willingness to exercise the military option not enough to show how that concern continued to be valid? Clinton should have known as early as the mid-1990s what Kristof claims, via Mr. Kamel, Bush should have known in 2002-2003.

The double standard applies because Bush actually did what he said he would do. And doing it damaged U.N. credibility and severely strained that institution's, and Europe's, relationship with the U.S.

We now see Hans Blix whine about U.S. legitimacy after the war in Iraq. He refers disparagingly to those Americans south of the Hudson, who are presumably less enlightened than their world-weary counterparts on the Continent. He complains that the American government is now making the same claim he did; namely, that the government needs more time to find weapons. Bitterness in one's mouth is the taste of Bush's pill of moral clarity and determination.

Kerry, Dean, the New York Times, and an increasingly extremist Democrat base can't live with Bush's victory, which should be celebrated as America's victory. Will they do what the same establishment did with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam? That is, turn a military victory into a political failure? Their talk about America's legitimacy and saving face is disingenuous, designed to camouflage hatred of Bush with concern for the nation's standing in the world. In the same way, Kenneth Starr's inquisitorial fascination with smut to nail a president was conducted under the false pretext of protecting the American family. If you haven't noticed, politics in America has become quite ugly.

Undermining an opponent's credibility is the sine qua non of political warfare. Like Clinton's more irrational enemies, Bush's foes are determined to paint him with every unseemly color they can. If it turns out Bush did refer to information he knew to be deemed false, it will, and should, damage him considerably. If it turns out Bush didn't, which is my assumption based on Kristof's hearsay, the irrational hatred towards Bush, and my judgment of his sterling character, his enemies will find something else, whatever they can reach, to beat him with.

What's most important, however, is that the U.N. and the Europeans never claimed that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction. Otherwise, why the inspection regime? It was not a matter of there being no weapons but that U.N. inspectors should have been given more time to find them and that Bush was being rash, imperial, and calculating to call off the ineffectual Easter egg hunt led by Hans Blix.

It is only after the fact, after Bush has earned enormous political capital by a successful military campaign, after the observable if nascent soul-searching of the Arab world in the campaign's aftermath, after the Left has been shown to be morally bankrupt to have resisted the removal of Saddam's regime, that the likes of Kristof, Dean, and Kerry charge Bush with misleading the nation.

The Middle East Media Research Institute has a disturbing report that will not undermine the opposition's worst intentions against Bush, given as it is to intelligent conjecture based on a reasonable understanding of Saddam's recorded words. The report details a number of meetings Saddam had with his scientists as described and quoted in Iraq's press. At one meeting, held in 2002, Saddam praised the initiatives of those warriors present and their innovations in the areas of their specializations. He was not talking about cracking the human genome.

This word chills to the bone.

Speaking sarcastically, Saddam said: "The American and the British talk is like a joke. They say that if Iraq is left alone it will produce this and that weapon that it would place at the disposal of terrorism. This kind of talk is close to a joke but they really mean to harm, that is to say to deny any Arab or Muslim [the opportunity] to develop. This is the evil program in the West and in America, in particular pursued by the Zionists…"

It is a stretch to suppose Saddam is talking about the English-speaking, Zionist- loving West trying to stymie Iraq's economic development. The question has to be asked, would one want to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt if it was never certain, with a rigorous verification exceeding reasonable doubt in a court of law, that he did indeed possess weapons of mass destruction? Would we be better off not to have acted on such tentative information given that we know Saddam had once possessed them and, more importantly, that the world must admit what kind of regime he had?

It is reasonable to suppose that Saddam could talk in slightly veiled code to announce he was pleased with the development of illicit weapons. There is just enough cocky assurance that the Americans might be listening but he can risk it. This is the same Saddam who would not budge in the face of U.N. inspections, daring its officials and workers to find what they may, while a massive build-up of American-led coalition troops and hardware was gathering at his southern border. But Saddam gambled big, seeking to impress his Arab brothers, and lost.

No weapons found implies he never had them? We'll see how this all turns out, but weapons or no, it is known that Saddam once had them and that he used them against his own people as Clinton and Bush have claimed ad nauseam. Would it have been prudent to assume, after September 11th, that he would never acquire and use such weapons again, that Saddam would never give them to a terrorist organization, while, putting them away instead, he plays the Third World victim-tyrant who has the grit to stand up to the Satanic United States?

Preemptive action was necessary and by no means unprecedented. You get safely bet that Saddam, like a child molester, would have struck again.