The phony war.(Iraq war, 2003)(Editor's Letter)

Forget that old saw about how a nation gets the leaders it deserves. Americans do deserve better than what we've gotten. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared that questions about the justifications for the war in Iraq are "outrageous"-a statement which is outrageous in and of itself. And it's clear that the drumbeat for answers has started and is growing, both outside the Republican Party and within. The war in Iraq is not a minor scandal; it may well prove to be the biggest scandal in American politics in the last hundred years. And although the Bush administration may feel it has gotten away with its phony war up to now, deceit on this level always catches up with you. The administration's rationale for launching a pre-emptive war against another nation boiled down to three reasons, all of which are proving to be dubious:

* Iraq and terrorism. As it is turning out, Saddam Hussein was no real threat to America. And, according to two of the highest-ranking leaders of al-Qaeda currently in U.S. custody, he had no major links to the terrorist organization, or to the September 11 attacks.

* He had weapons of mass destruction. According to published reports, when the C.I.A. evaluations of the potential Iraqi nuclear threat weren't, well, threatening enough, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had Pentagon intelligence units re-interpret the evidence to make it more frightening. (Where's Jayson Blair when you need him?) And in The Sunday Times of London, Phillip Knightley reported that the pre-war findings of the British intelligence unit M.I.6 were rewritten by the Blair government to make them "more exciting" and, therefore, a more useful tool in the prime minister's argument for war.

* Saddam be bad. Yes, of course he was bad. But if the presence of oppressive regimes is an adequate rationale for going to war, we're going to be busy for a long time. When do we invade Liberia? Congo? Zimbabwe? Ivory Coast? New York City?

It can certainly be argued that once given the go-ahead the Pentagon is more than up to the challenge of serving up a good war. It's just not so good at doing the dishes afterward. In The New York Times, Paul Krugman noted that, when the army's chief of staff warned that post-victory hand-holding in Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Bush's wise man Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark." We have 150,000 troops there now and they're barely hanging on. American G.I.'s are being killed. The country is littered with thousands of unexploded land mines and cluster bombs. Every single one of the more than 150 government buildings in Baghdad necessary to set up a provisional administration was looted and burned after the occupation began. There is only sporadic electricity. As far as the search for W.M.D. goes, the Pentagon has passed that thankless baton to the C.I.A. And we wonder why much of Iraq, now ...