Revisionist history.

Byline: The Register-Guard

News flash! The White House acknowledged Wednesday that its hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction has ended without finding the stockpiles that President Bush cited as the main justification for invading Iraq nearly two years - and more than 1,350 American lives - ago.

Given the president's extraordinary ability to revise his rationale for the war, some Americans may have forgotten the administration's original wide-eyed warnings about the imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

So here's a quick review of what administration officials, including the president himself, told the nation and the world about why a preemptive attack on Iraq was essential:

Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Sept. 8, 2002: "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

President Bush, Nov. 3, 2002: "Saddam Hussein is a man who told the world he wouldn't have weapons of mass destruction, but he's got them."

Secretary of State Colin Powell, Feb. 5, 2003 - five weeks before the invasion: "The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction pose to the world."

After a costly and painstaking two-year effort by a team of 1,500 military and intelligence specialists, the United States recently shut down its search without finding even one stockpile of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, has concluded that Iraq had not made any WMD since 1991.

The unmistakable conclusion is that the United Nations weapons inspections that Bush derided as ineffective were working precisely as intended. If the administration had given inspectors the time that other members of the Security Council said they needed, that reality might have become evident and the war - and all the chaos, uncertainty and death that it has wrought - might have been averted.

In the past year, the president said he was "disappointed" that WMD were not found and ordered a review of the "intelligence failures" that led to his false assumptions about Iraq. Yet he and other administration officials continue to insist that the invasion was necessary to protect the United States and the rest of the world from what we now know with a certainty was a toothless Saddam.

"Based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people," Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Wednesday.

Other administration justifications for the war also have failed the tests of time and truth. They include insinuations that Saddam provided support to al-Qaeda and played a role in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 - a groundless assumption that was disproven last year by the bipartisan, independent Sept. 11 commission.

Since then, the administration has continued to revise its justifications. For much of the past year, the working model has been the establishment of a new, democratic Iraq that will become a beacon of freedom in the Muslim world.

Given escalating violence, a Sunni boycott that threatens the Jan. 30 election and the looming threat of a civil war between Iraq's majority Shiite and minority Sunni populations, the administration's latest justification may well prove as groundless as its first.

And, at some point, Bush may run out of justifications for what increasingly appears to be an unjustifiable war.