As the Republicans gather in the Big Apple to anoint George W. Bush their standard-bearer for another four years, the campaign discourse has gotten bogged down in discussions about a pair of Republican ads in which a group of John Kerry-hating Swift Boat Veterans claim he doesn't deserve the military medals he was awarded 35 years ago. I suppose these Republican Swift Boaters are entitled to exercise their free speech, but it is troubling so much airtime and media energy is wasted on the statements of a group of partisans whose remarks in some cases are easily shown to contradict statements made by the same fellows in past years, in other cases are demonstrably false, but in all cases, are just not very relevant to the substantive issues of 2004. While denying any connection to the Swift Boat ads, which were paid for by a Bush campaign contributor and associate of Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove, Mr. Bush surely must take solace in the negative attention the ads have brought to his adversary, while keeping the public discussion of his record on the back burner.

Eventually, however, Mr. Bush needs to answer to the American electorate for his actions in the more recent Iraq war. For while Bush is still trying to spin that war as his personal triumph over the evil of terrorism, the evidence continues to mount that Mr. Bush and his advisers in fact lied repeatedly to the American people, the U.S. Congress, and the world about his reasons for launching a war in Iraq. The human cost of that war has been staggering. Aside from the nearly 1,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq to date, over 10,000 Iraqi civilians have perished and estimates of Iraqi military fatalities vary between 30,000 and 50,000. Keep in mind that a large number, if not most, of the Iraqi soldiers were involuntarily conscripted by Saddam. The Iraq war dead are far outnumbered by the wounded, many with life-altering permanent maiming including disfigurement, paralysis and loss of limbs or sight. Large numbers of these injuries and deaths have been inflicted on children. Children who survived have lost parents, parents have lost their children, and spouses have lost their mates. Homes have been destroyed, and families shattered.

Americans who judge Mr. Bush on his conduct of the Iraq war need to keep uppermost in their minds the horrific human suffering that the war and its aftermath have wreaked. War is the ultimate exercise of power by our President. When the American people elect him, they imbue the President with authority to wield the most lethal armed force in history. But the President who wields that awful power, must understand that he is required to be extraordinarily circumspect, that knowing its terrible consequences, he can lead this nation into war only when he has no other choice. Only an imminent deadly threat to the nation that cannot be avoided justifies the ultimate sanction of war.

It is now clear that Iraq was no such threat. George W. Bush had no corroborated, direct evidence that it was such a threat. In fact, he had a CIA report in February of 2003 that stated: "We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox (in 1991) to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs." (Bill Press, Bush Must Go, Dutton, 2004, page 20.) Yet the Bush Administration told the country over and over during the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003 that they knew that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction. A sampling of quotes of Bush and his advisers during the run-up to the Iraq war:

"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." Dick Cheney in a speech to a VFW Convention on August 26, 2002. (Id., page 16.)

"There's no debate in the world as to whether they have those weapons...We all know that. A trained ape knows that." Donald Rumsfeld in Pentagon Briefing, September 13, 2002. (Id.)

"There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons...Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between one hundred and five hundred tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill sixteen thousand battlefield rockets. Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. And we have sources who tell us that he recently authorized his field commanders to use them." Colin Powell at the United Nations, February 5, 2003. (Id.)

"Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a nuclear weapon is when, God forbid, he uses one." George W. Bush at the United Nations, September 12, 2002. ( Id., page 23)

"Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year." George W. Bush Radio Address, September 14, 2002 (Id., page 24...)

"The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address, January 28, 2003. (Id.) (Bush admitted after the invasion, in July of 2003, that this statement was not true, and he blamed it on a mistaken government intelligence analyst. Bush has never explained why the same statement was removed from a speech he was to make in Cincinnati the prior fall, when CIA Director George Tenet explained that the information was doubtful and uncorroborated. In fact, the information turned out to be based on obviously forged documents that a beginner intelligence analyst would have caught.)

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." George W. Bush Address to the Nation, March 17, 2003. (Id., page 17)

Nowhere in any of the above statements is there hesitancy, any suggestion of doubt or uncertainty. The words "no doubt" appear several times. Each statement is a simple declaration of unequivocal fact. It is now well known of course, that the intelligence sources that Bush and his men claimed they had was not so definite, not so unequivocal. Wrong, in fact.

There is only one conclusion to be drawn from all this. George W. Bush and his closest advisors lied about their certainty that Iraq possessed WMD. No other conclusion is possible. If these men were drawing inferences from uncertain intelligence, which apparently is what they did, then they lied when they stated that there were "no doubts" and that they "knew" that Saddam had WMD. The only way they would not have been lying is if the information they relied on was corroborated and in the nature of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But of course that was never the case. That was only what they publicly claimed was the case.

The lies about the WMD were not the only falsehoods that Bush and his men peddled before the war. They also tried to create a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda, to frighten the American people into believing that Saddam would hand over some of the deadly weapons in his arsenal to Osama bin Laden's legions. This link has never been demonstrated to be other than a small number of possible meetings between some Al Qaeda underlings and Saddam's subordinates. But no operational arrangement was ever found, and after extensive review of the existing intelligence, the recently released report of the 9/11 Commission stated: "But to date, we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts (in the early 1990s) ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States." (The 9/11 Commission Report, Authorized Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 2004, page 66.)

Bush had ample opportunity to find out for sure whether Saddam had WMD before he launched his war. UN Weapons Inspectors under the leadership of Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei were in Iraq in the midst of searching for Saddam's alleged weapons horde, and had been carrying out a rigorous inspection process for several months just prior to the war. No weapons had been found. Both Blix and ElBaradei were beginning to feel that no weapons would ever be found. Why did George W. Bush not wait for the UN Inspections to be completed? He refuses to answer that question. Instead, he has flip-flopped on his rationale for war: some days he says he went to war because Saddam was so evil, America had to save his people from him. Other days, he says he had a strong need to install a democracy in Iraq, in order to show the way to the other dictators in the Middle East.

None of Bush's reasons for his Iraq war meet the only moral justification for his exercise of the war-making power: that there be an imminent deadly threat that could be met in no other way than war. If Bush cannot be trusted to tell the truth about this, arguably the most important exercise of presidential power, can Americans afford to believe him about anything else? That is the question those thinking of voting for George W. Bush must ask themselves.

Robert C. Carmody