MAKING A CASE.

In recent days, as the White House speechwriters were weighing the language and the imagery of Tuesday's State of the Union address, President Bush was extemporizing his way toward war. He declared himself (vaguely) "sick and tired of games," exasperated by the arms-inspection process in Iraq and Saddam Hussein's attempts to evade it. And (even more vaguely) he warned any Iraqi commander who launched a weapon of mass destruction, "When Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried, and persecuted as a war criminal."

Ever since the last Presidential campaign, Bush's wary relationship to his native tongue has been the stuff of easy comedy; his love of being "misunderestimated" a gift not merely to the writers of "Saturday Night Live" but also to Karl Rove's political operation, which had been eager to contrast Candidate Bush's studied homeliness with Candidate Gore, who liked to tell reporters of his fondness for the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What pork rinds were to the father, malapropisms are to the son-- a gesture of cross-cultural solidarity.

On the level of state, however, the President's language, his ability to set out complex matters of policy for the American people, and also for our allies, and even our enemies, matters enormously. At the United Nations General Assembly more than four months ago, Bush, after long delay, opened his case against Saddam Hussein with a pointed litany of Iraq's egregious violations of human rights and international law. With a gravity appropriate to the occasion, Bush surveyed everything from Saddam's genocide in the Kurdish north to his relentless ambition to build nuclear weapons and dominate the region, by employing the same level of terror that keeps his own citizens in a state of constant subjugation.

But since this impressive opening foray the President has been less consistent in furthering, and deepening, his case for the use of force in Iraq. Even as he has dispatched aircraft carriers, fighter planes, and tens of thousands of troops to the region, he routinely dismisses important objections to, and questions about, the buildup to war; mainly, he has indulged in a rhetoric of irritation.

What is most unfortunate about the President's lack of public engagement in the argument for force is that the objections to it are answerable. There are, of course, some who oppose an invasion of Iraq on the ground that, say, peace is better than war, or that the "real issue" is a conspiracy of oil interests, or that the President is an avenging cowboy and all his advisers a posse. Far more seriously, there are questions of why now and why Iraq (and not North Korea or Iran); there are profound concerns about the loss of life (can't we just foment an Army coup?), and about what happens the day after Saddam is arrested, or killed, or lands on Elba. Do we really expect a Jeffersonian legislature to rise from the rubble of Saddam's palaces? Are we prepared for years of rebuilding in Iraq when we already seem to have lost interest in the continuing chaos in Afghanistan?

Saddam's record is unambiguously horrific, but the issue of a military offensive is almost uniquely complex as a matter of timing and strategy. There have been no recent Iraqi invasions of neighboring countries, no recent Biblical mass of refugees, no indisputable evidence of a connection with the Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. It is also unlikely that the White House or the United Nations inspection team will present this week what Adlai Stevenson presented to the ...