Bush insisted during the run-up to war that Saddam had an active biological and chemical weapons program and that he was aggressively pursuing the development of a nuclear weapons program. It was on the explicit grounds that Saddam's WMD capability presented an imminent threat to the security of the world that Bush took the US to war.

Mr. Kay's preliminary report makes it clear that even if Saddam is eventually found to have possessed some residual WMD capability and this is looking less likely by the day - under no circumstances did his WMD capability present an imminent threat to the world.

Somewhat perplexingly, Bush remains unabashed by the report's uncomfortable findings. He now insists that even if no active WMD capabilities or programs are found in Iraq, the war was still justified on the grounds of Saddam's history of developing and using WMD in the past and on the grounds that he was a brutal dictator.

Bush's anxiety for the suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam is refreshing but scarcely credible, if for no other reason than his administration's indifference to protecting human rights in other contexts.

In any case, the issue here is not whether or not Saddam had a history of developing and using WMDs or whether the Iraqi people are better off without him. The issue is whether it is acceptable to mislead the public into war.

It is possible that Bush did believe that Saddam should be removed from power due to his appalling human rights record and due to his history of developing and using WMD, but that is not what he told the world and that is not why he went to war. The justification he gave to the world for war was that Saddam possessed active WMD programs that posed an imminent threat to world security. Mr. Kay's initial report strongly suggests that Saddam's WMD capability posed no imminent threat to world security and that President Bush is thus guilty of seriously misrepresenting the case for war.