FAITH-BASED INTELLIGENCE.(assertion made in President Bush's state of union)

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." So said President Bush on January 28th, outlining the case for war with Iraq in his State of the Union address. It was perhaps the most chilling moment of the speech, for it raised the spectre of nuclear weapons in the hands of a dictator who had proved himself capable of terror, invasion, and genocide.

To many listeners, the attribution of this sensational piece of information to the British served only to emphasize its reliability. The President might as well have gone on to say, "And you can take that to the bank, because MI6 doesn't mess around." We now know that if the Administration had been playing it straight there would indeed have been a follow-up line, but it would have been something like this: "The C.I.A., however, believes that this so-called fact is almost certainly untrue."

Indeed, four months earlier, in October, 2002, the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, had personally intervened to remove from a Presidential speech an assertion that Iraq had tried to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. That "information" was a fantasy backed by a set of forged documents. The C.I.A. knew it; others in the government knew it; the President had no reason not to know it. What's more, by March, a number of reporters--including Seymour M. Hersh, in these pages--had published stories about this dubious intelligence and the pressure that the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office had been exerting on the C.I.A. to square the evidentiary circle. One war later, the President and his team have variously (1) denied that they knew the facts, (2) dissembled over who knew what when, (3) sort-of-but-not-really apologized, (4) said it's only "sixteen words" and "enormously overblown," and (5) ladled blame alternately upon the C.I.A., which had tried, however feebly, to prevent the damage, and the United Kingdom, America's only full-sized partner in the warmaking coalition.

Last week, Ari Fleischer conveyed the Bush team's general contempt for the media's interest in the Niger "documents" and, more generally, for the fact that, three months after the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein's arsenal so far appears more chimerical than chemical. "The President has moved on," Fleischer said in the days before he stepped down as press secretary. "And, I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on as well." The very idea that the Administration had put Iraq's nuclear ambitions at the center of its case for war, Fleischer said, was "a bunch of bull."

The President, for his part, told reporters that the intelligence behind his speech had been "darn good." Never mind that a flood of apoplectic C.I.A. analysts and ex-analysts have been telling reporters for months that the Administration was interested less in the ambiguities of reality than in arming itself with facts, half-facts, and suppositions sufficient to "prove" that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda and well stocked with weapons of mass destruction. It seems the President shares Ronald Reagan's notion that "facts are stupid things."

In reality, the arguments about Iraq were so complex, and so filled with competing and legitimate claims, that some of us, no matter where we came out, were divided within ourselves. Even the Administration betrayed signs of division: the axis made up of the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office was far more aggressive and unilateralist in the push for war than the State Department and much of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the end, the President made a case for war based broadly on three components: the nature and history of the Iraqi regime; the security of the United States; and the idea that a liberated Iraq would have a transformative effect on the region.

These propositions have fared variously since the fall of the regime. Of the three, the first seems, if anything, even firmer than it did before the war. The Baath regime had sustained itself from the start through the systemic use of torture, assassination, mass murder, and political suppression. Human Rights Watch reports that three hundred thousand people went "missing" under Saddam, and since his fall, twenty mass graves have ...