Tom,

I think its much too early to judge. But I do think that now is the time to begin posing some hard questions. The problem is no matter what answer you come up with, the Bush administration has some serious challenges to its credibility looming in the months preceding an election campaign.

My own take on this is firming up - that is to say, the Bush administration's claims were grossly exaggerated to make the American public's taste for pre-emptive war more palatable. We are likely to find traces of Saddam's chemical and bio-weapons infrastructure from before the first Gulf War, but little else.

This makes the most sense because the hundreds of tons of chemical weapons Powell refers to were believed to have been manufactured in the 1980's. Because the stuff has a shelf life of little more than five years, it would have lost both its strategic and tactical value by the mid-1990's. But neither Mr. Powell, nor Mr. Bush make this point particularly clear to the American public. However, experts in other nations knew this, which is why we had so much trouble getting support for the war from the U.N. Security Council. They knew the claims weren't credible from the beginning.

Though at the current moment, many Americans are still basking in the afterglow of an exhilarating military campaign, this issue and the questions surrounding it aren't going to go away very soon. The American media may much hay over the prior President lying about an illicit affair with an White House intern half his age. They will be far more interested in a President lying to convince the country to go to war if it turns out that this is the case.

Donald