INTELLIGENCE FLAWED, BUT NOT 'OVERHYPED'.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

IN response to David Kay's testimony that his Iraq Study Group was unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a new theory has taken hold, made popular by various critics of the war and Democratic presidential candidates. The theory holds that, prior to the invasion, the Bush administration ``overhyped'' the allegations against Saddam Hussein's regime to perpetuate a war that it favored for its own sinister motives.

There's just one problem with the theory: The Bush administration was hardly alone in believing that Hussein had WMDs.

Former President Clinton and his administration believed the same thing. So did the United Nations Security Council. Even French President Jacques Chirac concurred. While there was considerable debate about how best to disarm Hussein, no one seriously disputed that he needed disarming.

And for good reason. Hussein made it clear he had chemical weapons when he used them against his own people in the wake of the Gulf War, and allied forces discovered more of the same in 1991. In 1998, he effectively drove U.N. weapons inspectors out of the country, and when they returned in late 2002, he continued to stonewall and deceive them.

Given Hussein's past possession of WMDs and his refusal to cooperate fully with international inspectors, one could draw two possible conclusions. Either he was continuing to harbor the contraband, or he had decided to secretly and unilaterally disarm, purely out of the goodness of his own heart.

A reasonable person could only conclude the former.

But the inability of American inspectors to uncover Hussein's cache suggests that not even reasonable assumptions are safe when it comes to Saddam's unreasonable mind. For purposes that probably no one will ever comprehend, Hussein brought about his own demise by pretending to have weapons that he seemingly didn't have, at least not in great numbers, inviting the wrath of a cautious world that wasn't going to take his benevolent intentions for granted.

The possible explanations are many: Maybe he really thought he possessed the weapons, spurred on by fearful underlings who told him what he wanted to hear. Maybe he was able to conceal his stockpile - which, Kay says, could be hidden ``in spaces not much larger than a two-car garage'' - before or during the American-led invasion. Kay also speculates that some materials were lost during postwar looting, and that others were squirreled off to Syria.

All these possibilities, of course, are of grave concern, especially given Syria's well-documented ties to terrorists. But none undermines the principal justification for the war - that Hussein gave every indication to believe he was developing and stockpiling WMDs, and that, considering his hatred for America and his unseemly relationships with sundry terrorist organizations, he was not to be trusted.

The discoveries since the conclusion of the war only strengthen those suspicions. Although no WMDs have turned up, Kay and his associates found ample evidence of ongoing efforts to develop not only chemical and biological weapons, but nuclear as well. As Kay recently told NPR, ``I must say I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war.''

Meanwhile, a sadistic tyrant is now behind bars, and 24 million Iraqis enjoy a new freedom they never knew before. Libya's Moammar Gaddafi, learning from Saddam's fate, has voluntarily given up his country's nuclear program. And a concerted effort is under way to build democracy in a forlorn corner of the world that needs it desperately if the underlying causes of the War on Terror are ever to be put to rest.

The intelligence failures that apparently preceded the liberation of Iraq demand investigation, but intelligence failures are, unfortunately, nothing new. It was intelligence failures that failed to thwart 9-11, and it's intelligence failures that - according to recent discoveries - caused U.S. officials to underestimate the steady progress both Libya and Iran have made toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

As America continues to wage the War on Terror, there are obvious intelligence shortcomings that need addressing. But the notion that the Bush administration ``overhyped'' Hussein's WMD program is - like the BBC's recently disproved claim that British Prime Minister Tony Blair ``sexed up'' the evidence against Hussein - itself an overhyped charge.