MIGHT AND RIGHT.

Two weeks ago, on the first day of his first foreign trip since the fall of Baghdad, President Bush went to Auschwitz. The symbolism could not have been more heavy-handed: with the international press full of images of the grisly excavations of Saddam Hussein's killing fields, the President claimed the memory of the six million to explain his "war on terror," invoking the Nazi gas chambers and crematoriums as "a sobering reminder of the power of evil and the need for people to resist evil." Bush ended his trip in the same spirit, telling a cheering throng of American troops in Qatar, "The world is now learning what many of you have seen. They're learning about the mass graves. They're learning about the torture chambers. Because of you, a great evil has been ended." It's true that stopping Saddam's tyranny is the most heartening and unambiguous consequence of the war in Iraq. But Bush did not take over that country on a humanitarian impulse. As Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has said, although Saddam's "criminal treatment of the Iraqi people" was a "fundamental concern" for Washington's war planners, it was "not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it." Rather, according to the repeated claims of the Administration, our kids were put at risk in order to disarm Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons, which, intelligence assessments were said to show, posed an urgent threat to our national security.

So where is Saddam's terrible arsenal? Bush, on his way to Auschwitz, took time out to tell Polish television, "We found the weapons of mass destruction." That wasn't true. After more than two months of searching, American forces in Iraq had yet to discover any trace of biological or chemical agents. All they have found is a pair of tractor trailers, which appear to have been fitted out as weapons laboratories but never used. The President's readiness to present this discovery as a finding of the weapons themselves follows a pattern of distortions on the part of the Administration--hypotheticals proclaimed as facts, suspicions and fears spun as clear and present dangers, actions taken accordingly--throughout the planning, marketing, and prosecution of the war.

Why, exactly, are we in Iraq? Regardless of whether one supported or opposed the war, one cannot escape the impression that the weapons, some of which may yet be found, were a pretext for a campaign whose larger motives and purposes the Administration has never seen fit to articulate to the public. As the war drags on, a sense of reality is lacking in the Bush camp's triumphalism; Americans are still killing and dying in almost every news cycle, and Iraqi resentment is mounting against an improvised occupation that has set the nation free mainly in the sense that it is ungoverned. Against this background, the charges now circulating that Bush's war cabinet depended on false or, worse, falsified intelligence to exaggerate the threat of those weapons in the first place is much more than a technicality.

The press reports are damning. The Washington Post quotes C.I.A. analysts complaining that they felt steady pressure from Vice-President Dick Cheney, from Wolfowitz, and from their own boss, George Tenet, to amplify the danger of Iraq. The Times has picked up the thread of reporting in this magazine by Seymour M. Hersh about the Pentagon's creation of its own intelligence organ, with the apparent purpose of producing the ...