ADDRESSING THE CYNICAL POSTWAR REVISIONISTS

News that an interim report by the administration's chief weapons-hunter in Iraq will disclose that none of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction have yet been found will doubtless embolden the Democrats charging that President Bush "duped" America into war.
Even assuming for a moment - which we don't - that they have a case, what is it that the president's critics are suggesting?

That maybe America should apologize to the Butcher of Baghdad - and return him to power?

This surely would disappoint the 78 percent of Shi'ite Muslims in Baghdad who recently told Gallup pollsters that they support the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam...

it's important to remind those who have forgotten that almost no one questioned the fact that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of such weapons.

Not even those who now charge President Bush with "fraud" ever questioned the need to act:

* Not Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry, who said back in 1998 that "Saddam Hussein's objective is to maintain a program of weapons of mass destruction."

* Not Hans Blix - who, just days before the war broke out declared that Saddam still had not undertaken the "fundamental decision to disarm" demanded by the Security Council - but who is now writing a book declaring that Iraq's stockpiles were destroyed years ago.

Former President Bill Clinton, it should be noted, said last January that "we're still pretty sure [Saddam's] got botulism and the chemical agents VX and ricin," adding that "it's pretty clear there are still . . . substantial amounts of chemical and biological stocks unaccounted for." ...

Moreover, it should be recalled that the decision to go to war was based primarily on Saddam's willful defiance of multiple U.N. resolutions demanding that he either disarm or prove that he'd done so.

Yes, it would be nice if someone could find a mound in the desert under which all of Saddam's unconventional weapons lie buried. But no one ever believed it would be that easy.

Ultimately, America moved against Saddam, as Condoleezza Rice has said, "to depose a bloody tyrant who had defied the world for 12 years."

Nothing that has been learned since challenges the essential wisdom of that decision.