The issue is not so critical in the United States as it is in Great Britain, but questions are being asked. Where are those weapons of mass destruction?

One conservative colunmnist I regularly read (I really need to find one with a brain, this one does a great disservice to the conservative ideology) tried to spin the issue by claining liberals had made a big issue of Saddam's weapons in the buildup to America's war on Iraq. As I recall, however, the comment was this: If Saddam has the terrible weapons you say he has, won't he use them on our soldiers when they try to march into Baghdad?

He didn't use them, much to the relief of King George's supporters. It helped keep American casualties low, a critical objective in post-Vietnam military adventures. After all, war only adds to a president's political capital if the public continues to support it.

But why didn't he use them? The conservative's take is that we so disrupted Saddam's command and control structure that his loyal generals were unable to get the word out to the troops to use them. I grant that such may possibly be the explanation.

But our failure to find them so far suggests that they didn't use them because they couldn't find them either. That's not to say they didn't exist. Almost certainly Iraq did stockpile such weapons against the day some internal threat had the capacity to topple the Baathist regieme.

When someone has weapons to use against the citizens of the country you can't just leave them out in the open. This would be particularly true for Saddam, for he had a history of using brutal tactics against people who dared to dissent. What would you do if this country were taken over by a brutal dictator who regularly used poisons to wipe out whole communities? If you had any chance to find those weapons would you not destroy them?

And if you were such a dictator would you not realize this potential and take steps to be sure the downtrodden couldn't find those weapons? Even the United States military won't tell its own citizens where it has nuclear weapons. Their approach is to neither confirm nor deny any public assertion that weapons are stored at a particular location. I know this from my days covering protests at the Seneca Army Depot in New York State.

So the failure of the military to find weapons of mass destruction so far in their operations in no way suggests that Saddam didn't have them. The real question is if weapons so well hidden posed a serious threat to outsiders.

As I say, the issue isn't as critical here in the United States, where a majority of the population supported King George's warmongering. But in the United Kingdom, where a majority of the population opposed the war, the issue is very politically charged. The war was a tough sell for Tony Blair to make to the British government.

He, as well as Mr. Bush in this country, trotted out military intelligence demonstrating the existence of WMD as a major reason to strike first. "Get him before he gets us," was the general argument. And Mr. Blair went ahead and sent UK soldiers into harm's way despite the wishes of a majority of the population. That's why this issue is so big in the UK.

Now that the war is over the hawkish conservatives have refocused their message. We had to take Saddam out because he was so cruel to his people. "We've liberated them," the conservatives assert. I personally question that "fact." The average law-abiding Iraqi did "suffer" the indignity of not being able to speak his or her political mind. But women routinely had a prominent role in government and commerce. They weren't forced to wear baggy, modest by Islamic standards, clothing.

The average Iraqi went to work and earned a decent living. The average Iraqi worshipped God in relative freedom. Christian churches coexisted with Islamic Mosques and even a few Synagogues. Interreligious violence was rarely heard of and may, in the atmosphere of religious tolerance, have been as rare as it appeared.

These same citizens now cower in their houses at night, afraid to go out on the streets for fear of crime. Large sections of public and private infrastructure have been looted, leaving the working Iraqi nothing with which to earn a living. And Christians and Jews must be looking to the future with considerable trepidation about the future of religious freedom in their country. Have we liberated them? I trow not! (Look that one up in the dictionary -- it's obsolete, but it fits here.)

Anyway, if the justification for a first-strike war against Iraq is that we needed to liberate the citizens, why aren't we doing the same in the many other countries run by ruthless dictators? If we wanted to take on an illegitmate regieme that really posed a threat to the rest of the world, why haven't we taken on North Korea?

The head of state of an African country has recently been indicted by a war crimes tribunal. The evidence of atrocities is compelling. Why don't we move in and take his governing party out of power? It's easy to look at the crimes committed by Saddam and his cronies and think we've done something wonderful. It's a lot tougher to look at the world and work out a coherent foreign policy that holds all nations, rich and poor, advanced and regressive, powerful and weak, to the same standard.

Do you want to know why? Because the economic benefits aren't there and the political risks are much greater. A war with North Korea would not be the cakewalk that led our soldiers into Baghdad in which the weather was far more formiddable than the human opposition. A war in Africa would not open the door for great wealth to flow into the United States as a result.

The drawbacks I mention here are real, legitimate concerns for the maker of public policy. But our leaders need to quit lying to us. They need to tell us the unvarnished truth about why decisions are made and let us play our role of empowered, self-governed citizens and speak our minds on the issues at hand.

Some have suggested that the WMD issue reveals a failure of military intelligence. It makes the term look like the oxymoron of popular characterization. At the best, they say, we have a situation in which the intelligence community didn't come out with the best answers. At the worst, we have a government that intentionally lied to us in order to achieve political goals.

Let's look at the options:

• The military intelligence community was right about Saddam's weapons and just wasn't able to determine where they are. In that case we'll soon find them and Tony Blair's job will be safe.
• The military intelligence community had a general idea of what was happening in Iraq, but failed at generating the appropriate emphasis. That is, Saddam had WMD, but as long as we kept pressure on him it would be difficult for him to use them. War was not necessary as long as inspectors could more or less freely roam the country.
• The Pentagon and the White House pressured the intelligence community to reach the conclusions it wanted them to reach in order to sell the war to the American public.
• The Pentagon and White House took the information provided by the intelligence community (whatever its accuracy) and gave it a spin that would support the preferred conclusion, that war was warranted.
• The parties involved colluded together to provide the information that would help George convince the American people and Tony Blair to let him go to war. They would probably also have been trying to convince the rest of the world -- something they failed to do.

In all of these scenarios the correct spin is at the center. There was NOT a comittment on the part of the administration to collect and communicate facts without bias and allow the public and the world to make decision without pressure.

Is that failure in committment to truth morally different from the blatant lie from the former president, "I did not have sex with that woman." We humans engage in very tricky business when we start trying to compare the relative morality of our actions.

The Bible put it this way, "...but they, comparing themselves among themselves and measuring themselves by themselves, are not wise." Let's look at the issues. Because we aren't privy to all the facts available to the administration we can't make an accurate assessment of when and where the lying actually took place.

And that penchant for secrecy is, in itself, a problem. It says that the president doesn't trust the American people to make a reasoned choice based on full information. It demonstrates an attitude that George and his cronies believe they are better prepared to make d