Editorial: IRAQ'S WEAPONS: Missing Logic.

The most vociferous critics of the president appear to be in the grip of a fairly obvious logical fallacy: Since we have not yet found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq they must not have existed and the administration is guilty of having invented a bogeyman.

In truth, we had every reason to think that the Iraqi regime had such weapons. The regime itself admitted that it had produced anthrax and VX. In his January 27 report to the Security Council, Hans Blix said that there was "strong evidence" that Iraq had produced more anthrax than it had said, and suggested that it had higher-quality VX, too. We know that the regime used chemical weapons before. The Clinton administration believed that the regime was working to expand its WMD capabilities. The Bush administration's Democratic critics generally did not dispute this point before the war. Indeed, one of the antiwar arguments was that a military campaign would expose our troops to WMD. The hawks may have overestimated the dangers of inaction; the doves clearly overestimated the dangers of action. Prudence demanded that we assume, in the face of the regime's failure to account for its weapons, that it still had them.

Some of the evidence now used to indict the administration is suspect. Deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz's words to Vanity Fair have been twisted to suggest that the administration seized on the WMD issue "for bureaucratic reasons" but really had other motives for the war, such as gaining the ability to remove our troops from Saudi Arabia. All Wolfowitz really said was that there were several reasons to overthrow the Iraqi regime, of which its WMD program was the most broadly compelling.

Iraq covers a lot of territory, and Saddam was (is?) wily: For the same reasons we figured that the inspectors would never find his weapons, we should not be shocked that we have not found them yet. The president's counsel of patience should be heeded.

But if opponents of the war are overreaching, it must be said that supporters have made mistakes of their own. A frustrated president said that we had "found" WMD when we had only found mobile labs that could be used to develop them. Some hawks have even denied the importance of WMD as a reason for the war. They have spoken as though the discovery of mass graves and other evidence of Baathist cruelty were all the justification the war needed. A reduction in the amount of evil in the world is of course an accomplishment worth celebrating. But we did not go to war in a humanitarian enterprise.

That does not mean that the weapons of mass destruction were the only reason for regime change. National Review has supported regime change since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when Saddam Hussein was "merely" a regional threat. The strategic case for the war also included the upside potential of establishing a liberal beachhead in the Arab world. But the WMD program was the decisive argument in the pre-war debate, the trump card that supporters of the war, including us, used to establish the urgency of regime change. Many of us argued not only that it was prudent to assume Iraq had the weapons, but also - - on the basis of administration reports -- that it definitely had them. If the weapons are not found or accounted for, American credibility will suffer a heavy blow: and it will be harder to trust intelligence reports about North Korean or Iranian threats. Allies who relied on our information will be chastened, or worse.

Many of Bush's defenders have argued that the Iraqi regime must have had WMD: Why else would it have kicked out the inspectors in 1998? That's an excellent point. But asking it is not a substitute for finding the weapons -- and for redressing, with sobriety rather than reckless partisanship, the possible intelligence failures that have brought us here.