WASHINGTON, June 17 -- American intelligence analysts reported to the Bush administration last year that Saddam Hussein's government had begun to deploy chemical weapons but that Baghdad would almost certainly not use them unless the government's survival was at stake, United States officials said today.

In a wide-ranging report in November, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it was unlikely that Iraq would use unconventional weapons as long as there were United Nations sanctions against the country. President Saddam Hussein would turn to the weapons only "in extreme circumstances," the D.I.A. report concluded, "because their use would confirm Iraq's evasion of U.N. restrictions," according to the report, portions of which were read to a reporter by an intelligence official.

The November D.I.A. report, which remains classified, indicates that most analysts believed at the time that Iraq had some illegal weapons, but that Mr. Hussein was not likely to use them or share them with terrorists.

The report also provides fuller context for statements made last fall by George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence, in a letter to Congress in which he said Iraq might use its weapons, but only if attacked. . . .

The D.I.A. report suggests that while, before the war, there was something close to a consensus in intelligence agencies that Iraq still had a program to develop illegal weapons, there was debate about whether Iraq intended to use them against the United States.

The report, titled "Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and missile programs," also stated that the United States had evidence of "munitions transfer activity in mid-2002," suggesting that "the regime is distributing chemical warfare munitions in preparation for an anticipated U.S. attack."

That tactical intelligence suggested that Mr. Hussein was planning to deploy chemical weapons to his most elite military units in case of an American invasion. As a result, the American military prepared ground forces for chemical attacks, requiring troops to frequently don chemical protective suits. Chemical weapons were never used during the war.

But short of an all-out invasion of Iraq, the D.I.A. analysts did not see many situations in which Mr. Hussein would turn to unconventional weapons, the report shows.

"Iraq's chemical agent use against Iran and the Kurds suggest that Baghdad possesses the political will to use any and all" illegal weapons, the report said, but only if "regime survival was imminently threatened."

WASHINGTON, June 17 -- Despite growing questions about whether the White House exaggerated the evidence about Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons, President Bush and his aides believe that the relief that Americans feel about Mr. Hussein's fall in Iraq will overwhelm any questions about the case the administration's built against him, administration officials and Republican strategists say.

For two days, Mr. Bush has characterized his critics as engaging in "revisionist history," and he has dwelled on the outcome of the war rather than the urgent nature of the threat that he described, almost daily, to build support for military action. As part of the drive to limit the political fallout, Republicans have moved quickly to resist Democrats' calls for a summer of public hearings, even as the intelligence committees of both houses begin reviewing intelligence material delivered under tight security by the Central Intelligence Agency. . . .

Still, Democrats are pressing the case, led by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who is calling for open and closed hearings -- and a report by the end of the year, when the presidential primaries are in full gear.

"They have gone into an enormous defensive mode," Mr. Rockefeller said today, referring to efforts by the White House and Republican lawmakers to tamp down the issue of whether intelligence was manipulated. "They are trying to make it into a little molehill." . . .

A CBS News poll released three days ago shows that a growing number of Americans believe that the administration overestimated Iraq's capabilities. But it does not appear to make a difference: 62 percent said that the ouster of Mr. Hussein was, by itself, worth the cost in American lives.

"We may have gone to war because of weapons of mass destruction, but we have made our conclusions based on the reaction of the Iraqi people," said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster. "Are we relieved? Yes," Mr. Luntz said. "Do we feel good about ourselves? Absolutely."

Yet some Republicans remain worried -- in part because they fear that the rising tide of criticism in Britain against Prime Minister Tony Blair could leap the Atlantic. If the British investigation gains steam, they note, the echo in Washington could be significant. "After all," said one senior diplomat of a coalition country, "we were all working off the same shared evidence. If it was wrong for one, it was wrong for all."

BRITAIN is pressing America to offer top Iraqi prisoners possible freedom in exchange for information to speed up the search for Saddam Hussein and his missing weapons of mass destruction.

British officials are telling Washington that plea bargaining is the only way to track down the dictator and his arsenal, but to the Government's intense frustration the Bush Administration has so far rejected the appeals of its closest coalition ally.

Thirty-one of the fifty-five individuals on America's most-wanted "pack of cards" list have been arrested, but British officials told The Times that none of them had divulged any information during intensive interrogation.

The British Government wants to tell them that in exchange for crucial information their help will be taken into account if they appeared at a war crimes court. They might even be offered protection and a new life overseas if their information were decisive.

"We have been trying for ages to persuade the Americans but they have come up with all kinds of legal arguments," one government official said. US authorities have been happy to offer plea bargains to some of America's most notorious criminals, but apparently draw the line at members of a regime that they have denounced as evil. . . .

The prisoners include Tariq Aziz, the former Deputy Prime Minister, Zuhayr Talib abd al-Sattar al-Naqib, director of military intelligence, Amir Hamudi Hasan al-Sadi, a presidential advisor on scientific and technical affairs, and Rihab Taha, also known as Dr Germ.

A few top scientists have been flown out of Iraq, but most of the detainees are still being held at an undisclosed location in Baghdad. They have been questioned frequently by the CIA and other agencies, including MI6, but have revealed nothing.

British officials said that they all had similar stories about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, claiming there was no clandestine programme, and the coalition interrogators were getting nowhere.

President Bush dismisses questions as to whether his administration misrepresented intelligence about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, calling such accusations the product of "revisionist historians." But who's revising what with this daily name-calling campaign over recent history? The only way the administration can put to rest questions about its actions is to give up its resistance to a thorough congressional investigation of the intelligence concerning Iraq.

This is not just a matter for the record or for partisan jousting, although a congressional investigation would serve both purposes. It goes to the crux of the conduct of American foreign policy, this country's global credibility and the constitutional duties of the commander in chief. Polls indicate that most Americans are indifferent as to whether Iraq really had weapons of mass destruction. But the British are outraged over the testimony Tuesday of two former Cabinet ministers in a parliamentary hearing on Iraq that they believe Prime Minister Tony Blair twisted intelligence to exaggerate the danger posed by Saddam Hussein.

In Washington, the Senate and House are conducting closed intelligence hearings this week. But Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, balks at open hearings. Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, correctly seeks open hearings and a public report.

Committee member Carl Levin (D-Mich.) wants to publicly question CIA Director George J. Tenet. Levin contends Tenet misled Americans and believes the U.S. did not fully disclose to United Nations weapons inspectors full intelligence on possible Iraqi weapon sites; to have done so might have prolonged the push for inspections and disrupted the administration's rush to war, Levin says. These and other such serious accusations -- including whether the administration pressured analysts to come up with worst-case analyses of Iraqi weaponry -- can best be answered in public hearings.

Bush officials may hope they can ward off such sessions, stalling in the hope that U.S. forces do find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Especially as the parties head into the 2004 presidential campaign, Democrats will be eager to hammer at this topic and anything else they can find to embarrass Bush. But something more than partisanship is at stake here now: Britain is conducting a real investigation into the intelligence it had about Baghdad, and the U.S. can too. If America must mobilize the world in the days to come about grave concerns such as the nuclear intentions of North Korea or Iran, it will need intelligence that isn't under a cloud of doubt about what may, or may not, have happened with Iraq.

UNITED NATIONS, June 18 -- Hans Blix, the retiring chief weapons inspector for the United Nations, has questioned in an interview why American and British forces expected to find large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq when it was clear that his inspectors had failed to report any such discovery.

In an interview on Tuesday in his 31st-floor offices at the United Nations, he said:

"What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons. I don't see how they could have come to such an attitude if they had, at any time, studied the reports" of present and former United Nations inspectors.

"Is the United Nations on a different planet?" he added. "Are reports from here totally unread south of the Hudson?" . . .

Asked about the war's outcome, Mr. Blix said, "We all welcome the disappearance of one of the world's most horrible regimes."

He added: "The good impact is the freeing of the Iraqi people. The bad impact is people have died, and the destruction that was brought there. The good impact may be upon the peace negotiations" in the Middle East. "I don't know. It's too early to know."

He continued: "The negative impact is the anti-Americanism that is abroad in the Middle East. And the bad impact would be if it drags out and you have more people become guerrillas in Iraq. The bad impact, I think, is on the U.N. Security Council -- the U.S. further going away from the Security Council, saying this is a hopeless institution."

Former CIA director Stansfield Turner accused the Bush administration Tuesday of "overstretching the facts" about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in making its case for invading that country.

Turner's broadside adds the retired admiral's name to a list of former intelligence professionals concerned that the CIA and its intelligence reports were manipulated to justify the war. Since Baghdad fell April 9, U.S. forces have been unable to find chemical and biological weapons the White House said were in Iraq.

Turner, who headed the CIA under President Carter, paused for a long moment when asked by reporters whether current CIA Director George Tenet should resign. "That's a tough one," Turner said. The problem did not appear to lie with the CIA, he said, but Tenet should consider resigning if he lost the confidence of President Bush or the American people. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Turner suggested Tenet should tread cautiously because CIA directors "can be made the fall guy" by administrations when policy judgments based on intelligence go wrong.

Turner said, "There is no question in my mind (policymakers) distorted the situation, either because they had bad intelligence or because they misinterpreted it."

Public criticism of an administration's handling of intelligence is rare from former CIA directors, who typically give the benefit of the doubt to those with full access to classified information. . . .

Turner's comments come a month after a group of retired U.S. intelligence officers wrote President Bush to "express deep concern" over alleged misuse of intelligence to justify the war.

Resolved, That the President is requested to transmit to the House of Representatives not later than 14 days after the date of the adoption of this resolution documents or other materials in the President's possession that provides specific evidence for the following claims relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction:

(1) On August 26, 2002, the Vice President in a speech stated: 'Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction . . . What he wants is time, and more time to husband his resources to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons program, and to gain possession of nuclear weapons.'.

(2) On September 12, 2002, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, the President stated: 'Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons . . . Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.'.

(3) On October 7, 2002, in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, the President stated: 'It [Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons . . . And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.'.

(4) On January 7, 2003, the Secretary of Defense at a press briefing stated: 'There is no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons.'.

(5) On January 9, 2003, in his daily press briefing, the White House spokesperson stated: 'We know for a fact that there are weapons there [in Iraq].'.

(6) On March 16, 2003, in an appearance on NBC's 'Meet The Press', the Vice President stated: 'We believe he [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. El Baradei frankly is wrong.'.

(7) On March 17, 2003, in an Address to the Nation, the President stated: '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.'.

(8) On March 21, 2003, in his daily press briefing the White House spokesperson stated: 'Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.'.

(9) On March 24, 2003, in an appearance on CBS's 'Face the Nation', the Secretary of Defense stated: 'We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they're weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established.'.

(10) On March 30, 2003, in an appearance on ABC's 'This Week', the Secretary of Defense stated: 'We know where they [weapons of mass destruction] are, they are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.'.

After roughly 280 days worth of fearful descriptions of the formidable Iraqi arsenal, coming on the heels of seven years of UNSCOM weapons inspections, four years of surveillance, months of UNMOVIC weapons inspections, the investiture of an entire nation by American and British forces, after which said forces searched "everywhere" per the words of the Marine commander over there and "found nothing," after interrogating dozens of the scientists and officers who have nothing to hide anymore because Hussein is gone, after finding out that the dreaded 'mobile labs' were weather balloon platforms sold to Iraq by the British, George W. Bush and his people suddenly have a few things to answer for. . . .

George W. Bush and his people used the fear and terror that still roils within the American people in the aftermath of September 11 to fob off an unnerving fiction about a faraway nation, and then used that fiction to justify a war that killed thousands and thousands of people.

Latter-day justifications about 'liberating' the Iraqi people or demonstrating the strength of America to the world do not obscure this fact. They lied us into a war that, beyond the death toll, served as the greatest Al Qaeda recruiting drive in the history of the world. They lied about a war that cost billions of dollars which could have been better used to bolster America's amazingly substandard anti-terror defenses. They are attempting, in the aftermath, to misuse the CIA by blaming them for all of it.

Blaming the CIA will not solve this problem, for the CIA is well able to defend itself. Quashing investigations in the House will not stem the questions that come now at a fast and furious clip.

The row over Iraq's missing weapons intensified in Washington yesterday as a leading Senate Democrat accused the CIA of deliberately misleading United Nations inspectors to help clear the decks for an invasion of Iraq.

The charge by Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, comes as Congress gears up for its own hearings into whether the Bush administration misinterpreted or manipulated pre-war intelligence on the scale of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Mr Levin is not the first Democrat to question the CIA's role. But his allegations are the most precise yet, and seem bound to increase pressure for a fuller, more public investigation than the Republican majority on Capitol Hill has been willing to concede thus far.

Mr Levin says that when the UN team under Hans Blix returned to Iraq last autumn, the CIA - contrary to what it claimed at the time - did not pass on its full list of 150 high or medium priority suspected weapons sites. This, in turn, enabled the US government to shut down the inspections quickly, opening the path for military action.

"Why did the CIA say that they had provided detailed information to the UN inspectors on all of the high and medium suspect sites, when they had not?" Mr Levin asked. "Did the CIA act in this way in order not to undermine administration policy?"

Had it been known that there were still outstanding sites, he suggested, there would have been "greater public demand that the inspection process continue".

ATLANTIC, Iowa -- Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on Tuesday called for an independent investigation of President Bush and his justification for the U.S.-led war against Iraq, arguing that the commander in chief misled the country.

"I think the president owes this country an explanation because what the president said was not entirely truthful, and he needs to explain why that was," Dean said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Dean cited a number of statements made by Bush and other senior administration officials about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the dangers that the regime posed to the United States. The candidate said the claims were made even though officials knew they weren't true.

"We need a thorough look at what really happened going into Iraq," Dean said. "It appears to me that what the president did was make a decision to go into Iraq sometime in early 2002, or maybe even late 2001, and then try to get the justification afterward." . . .

Dean, an outspoken opponent of the war, said an independent probe is warranted because the Republican-controlled Congress is unwilling to challenge a popular GOP president.

"No one is going to trust a right-wing Congress to do this," said the former Vermont governor.

Dean's rival, Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, also said Tuesday that the inability of coalition forces to find weapons of mass destruction at this point calls into question the credibility of the administration.

At the heart of the mystery lies the fact that the Iraqis do not seem to have deployed any stocks of munitions filled with nonconventional weapons. Why did Saddam Hussein not hit coalition troops with a barrage of chemical and biological weapons rather than allow his regime to fall? Why did we not find them in ammunition dumps, ready to be fired?

Actually, there are many possible explanations. Saddam Hussein may have underestimated the likelihood of war and not filled any chemical weapons before the invasion. He may have been killed or gravely wounded in the "decapitation" strike on the eve of the invasion and unable to give the orders. Or he may have just been surprised by the extremely rapid pace of the coalition's ground advance and the sudden collapse of the Republican Guard divisions surrounding Baghdad. It is also possible that Iraq did not have the capacity to make the weapons, but given the prewar evidence, this is still the least likely explanation.

The one potentially important discovery made so far by American troops -- two tractor-trailers found in April and May that fit the descriptions of mobile germ-warfare labs given by Iraqi defectors over the years -- might well point to a likely explanation for at least part of the mystery: Iraq may have decided to keep only a chemical and biological warfare production capability rather than large stockpiles of the munitions themselves. This would square with the fact that several dozen chemical warfare factories were rebuilt after the first gulf war to produce civilian pharmaceuticals, but were widely believed to be dual-use plants capable of quickly being converted back to chemical warfare production.

In truth, this was always the most likely scenario. Chemical and biological warfare munitions, especially the crude varieties that Iraq developed during the Iran-Iraq War, are dangerous to store and handle and they deteriorate quickly. But they can be manufactured and put in warheads relatively rapidly -- meaning that there is little reason to have thousands of filled rounds sitting around where they might be found by international inspectors. It would have been logical for Iraq to retain only some means of production, which could be hidden with relative ease and then used to churn out the munitions whenever Saddam Hussein gave the word.

Still, no matter what the trailers turn out to be, the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in no way invalidates the prewar intelligence data indicating that Iraq had the clandestine capacity to build them. There has long been an extremely strong case -- based on evidence that largely predates the Bush administration -- that Iraq maintained programs in weapons of mass destruction. It was this evidence, along with reports showing the clear failure of United Nations efforts to impede Iraq's progress, that led the Clinton administration to declare a policy of "regime change" for Iraq in 1998. . . .

At no point before the war did the French, the Russians, the Chinese or any other country with an intelligence operation capable of collecting information in Iraq say it doubted that Baghdad was maintaining a clandestine weapons capability. All that these countries ever disagreed with the United States on was what to do about it.

Which raises the real crux of the slanted-intelligence debate: the timing of the war. Why was it necessary to put aside all of our other foreign policy priorities to go to war with Iraq in the spring of 2003? It was always the hardest part of the Bush administration's argument to square with the evidence. And, distressingly, there seems to be more than a little truth to claims that some members of the administration skewed, exaggerated and even distorted raw intelligence to coax the American people and reluctant allies into going to war against Iraq this year.

Before the war, some administration officials clearly tended to emphasize in public only the most dire aspects of the intelligence agencies' predictions. For example, of greatest importance were the estimates of how close Iraq was to obtaining a nuclear weapon. The major Western intelligence services essentially agreed that Iraq could acquire one or more nuclear bombs within about four to six years. However, all also indicated that it was possible Baghdad might be able to do so in as few as one or two years if, and only if, it were able to acquire fissile material on the black market.

This latter prospect was not very likely. The Iraqis had been trying to buy fissile material since the 1970's and had never been able to do so. Nevertheless, some Bush administration officials chose to stress the one-to-two-year possibility rather than the more likely four-to-six year scenario. Needless to say, if the public felt Iraq was still several years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon rather than just a matter of months, there probably would have been much less support for war this spring.

Moreover, before the war I heard many complaints from friends still in government that some Bush officials were mounting a ruthless campaign over intelligence estimates. I was told that when government analysts wrote cautious assessments of Iraq's capabilities, they were grilled and forced to go to unusual lengths to defend their judgments, and some were chastized for failing to come to more alarming conclusions. None of this is illegal, but it was perceived as an attempt to browbeat analysts into either changing their estimates or shutting up and ceding the field to their more hawkish colleagues.

More damning than the claims of my former colleagues has been some of the investigative reporting done since the war. Particularly troubling are reports that the administration knew its contention that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger was based on forged documents. If true, it would be a serious indictment of the administration's handling of the war.

As important as this debate is, what may ultimately turn out to be the biggest concern over the Iraqi weapons program is the question of whose hands it is now in. If we do confirm that those two trailers are mobile biological warfare labs, we are faced with a tremendous problem. If the defectors' reports about the rates at which such mobile labs were supposedly constructed are correct, there are probably 22 more trailers still out there. Where are they? Syria? Iran? Jordan? Still somewhere in Iraq? Or have they found their way into the hands of those most covetous -- Osama bin Laden and his confederates?

If you were (a) paying attention to this debate, and (b) not an utterly rabid ideologue, you knew the administration was tossing around all sorts of improbable, unproven or just plain ridiculous stories. All that's changed is that something else truly unexpected happened: We didn't find anything -- no chemicals, no biologicals, no nothing -- at least not yet. And that fact suddenly made it possible to discuss, or maybe just impossible to ignore, what most of us knew all along.

Let's review how we got here.

There were really two WMD debates. One was about chemical and low-end biological weapons. The other was about smallpox, nukes, al Qaeda and pretty much everything else under the sun.

On the former, the White House didn't hoodwink anyone, since virtually everyone in the foreign policy mainstream figured that Iraq at least maintained a chemical and biological weapons capacity. I certainly thought so.

At a minimum, there was solid circumstantial evidence to believe that they did. Frankly, there still is.

The Iraqis stubbornly resisted and stymied the U.N. inspectors until the old inspections regime collapsed in 1998 -- and at a very high cost. Back then the inspectors still believed that vast stocks of chemical and biological agents remained unaccounted for. It made no sense to believe that with the inspectors gone the Iraqis would not only shutter their weapons program but ditch the goods they'd expended so much effort to conceal.

Debate No. 2 was an entirely different story. Here, the administration was clearly in kitchen-sink territory. The Iraqis were close to getting a nuke. (Remember Condi's line -- "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" -- and Dick Cheney's wild-eyed predictions.) They were tight with al Qaeda. They were developing horrible and unimaginable new bacteriological agents. They might be doing this; they might be doing that. Might, might, might!

It's not so much that the administration was lying -- as in saying things it knew to be false -- as it was happy to pass along or credit almost anything anybody said no matter how speculative the theory or how flimsy the evidence: uncorroborated tales from defectors, crackpot theories from think-tank denizens, worst-case-scenario speculations, anything.

We had good reason to suspect Saddam's continuing nuclear ambitions, and that made it extremely important to get inspectors back in the country. Unlike chemical and biological weapons, a serious nuclear program is hard to conceal. But long before the current brouhaha broke out over the bogus Niger-uranium sale documents, little of the administration's actual evidence on the nuclear front stood up to real scrutiny.

Meanwhile, the evidence for an al Qaeda link ranged from the extremely speculative to the extremely ridiculous.

To get a feel for the quality of the administration's evidence for an al Qaeda link, just remember how often administration officials jabbered on about Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-affiliated jihadist group operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan.

That sounded like the smoking gun until you considered that that was the part of Iraq that Saddam hadn't controlled for years because of our no-fly zones.

True, there were some speculative and very self-interested allegations that Saddam might be aiding Ansar to knock the dominant pro-U.S. Kurdish parties off balance. But based simply on Ansar's location, Saddam might as credibly have accused us of harboring Ansar against him as the other way around.

That and lots of other stuff just didn't pass the laugh test. But pretty much everyone in the press and the political class gave them a pass.

The deal was that all of the more ridiculous and far-fetched statements would be forgiven and forgotten so long as we found a good stash of chemicals and biologicals. It was only after even that stuff didn't turn up that folks gave a long second thought to what top administration officials had been peddling.

So let's not kid ourselves by pretending there's some new debate about whether the White House hyped and misled the public about the scope of Iraqi WMD or an al Qaeda link. We knew that.

As for settling the argument about WMD as a justification for the war, that argument is already settled. It's obvious that the Bush administration had no good evidence to back up its dire warnings. And even if months of desperate searching ultimately turns up a thing or two, this will hardly vindicate the administration's claim to have known it all along. The administration itself in effect now agrees that actually finding the weapons doesn't matter. It asserts that the war can be justified on humanitarian grounds alone and that Hussein may have destroyed those weapons on his way out the door. (Exactly what we wanted him to do, by the way, now repositioned as a dirty trick.) These are not the sorts of things you say if you know those weapons exist. And if it doesn't matter that they don't seem to exist, it cannot logically matter if they do.

After criticizing the Clinton administration for overdeploying and overusing the country's military in the 1990s, the Bush administration is now doing exactly the same thing -- except on a much larger scale. Hordes of active-duty troops and reservists may soon leave the service rather than subject themselves to a life continually on the road. Much more than transforming the armed forces or relocating overseas bases, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must solve this problem before the Bush administration breaks the American military.

The problem is most acute for the Army. Even as most Marines, sailors and Air Force personnel go home to a grateful nation, the Army still has more than 185,000 troops deployed in and around Iraq. Another 10,000 are in Afghanistan. More than 25,000 troops are in Korea; some 5,000 are in the Balkans; and dozens here and hundreds there are on temporary assignments around the world. Nearly all of these soldiers are away from their home bases and families.

This total of nearly 250,000 deployed troops must be generated from an Army of just over 1 million. The active-duty force numbers 480,000, of which fewer than 320,000 are easily deployable at any given moment. The Army Reserve and Army National Guard together include 550,000 troops, many of whom already have been called up at least once since 9/11.

Deployment demands are likely to remain great, even if Rumsfeld and Bush hope otherwise. The Pentagon is lining up 20,000 to 30,000 allied troops to help in Iraq come September, from countries such as Poland and Italy and Ukraine. Unfortunately, as recent events underscore, the overall mission will still likely require nearly 200,000 coalition forces. That means 125,000 to 150,000 U.S. troops could still be needed for a year or more -- with 50,000 to 75,000 Americans remaining in and around Iraq come 2005 and 2006 if past experience elsewhere is a guide.

As a result, a typical soldier spending 2003 in Iraq may come home this winter only to be deployed again in late 2004 or 2005. The typical reservist might be deployed for another 12 months over the next few years. These burdens are roughly twice what is sustainable.

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as charg? d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and S?o Tom? and Pr?ncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council.

It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me.

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake ? a form of lightly processed ore ? by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.

In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70's and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90's. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible.

The next morning, I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy. For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq ? and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired.

(As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors ? they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government ? and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)

Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a "white paper" asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn't know that in December, a month before the president's address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case.

Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted.

I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program ? all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.

But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.

Meeting last month at a sweltering U.S. base outside Doha, Qatar, with his top Iraq commanders, President Bush skipped quickly past the niceties and went straight to his chief political obsession: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? Turning to his Baghdad proconsul, Paul Bremer, Bush asked, "Are you in charge of finding WMD?" Bremer said no, he was not. Bush then put the same question to his military commander, General Tommy Franks. But Franks said it wasn't his job either. A little exasperated, Bush asked, So who is in charge of finding WMD? After aides conferred for a moment, someone volunteered the name of Stephen Cambone, a little-known deputy to Donald Rumsfeld, back in Washington. Pause. "Who?" Bush asked.

The details in the great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run.

As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its habitus, or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an 18th-century Constitution reinforced by two centuries of Talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the U.S.A. are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has also made the government of the U.S.A. largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid, effective national decision-making, not least by the president, is almost impossible. The United States, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of U.S. and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. That has created the foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to function as the world's only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world.

Except for a brief respite in the '90s, for most of my adult life American politics has been stuck in the grip of two competing and unsatisfactory theories. The first, which I thought we'd disproved in the '80s, was the conservative notion that America should ask the least of those with the most. That idea was so far wrong, it took our country a decade to recover, and yet our leaders are making the same mistake again, this time with feeling. The second theory, which I thought we'd banished in the last decade, was the notion among some in my party that we could spend our way out of every problem. It didn't work, yet some in my party want to bring it back. . . .

The President and I agree on one thing: this campaign should be a debate about values. We need to have that debate, because the values of this president and this administration are not the values of mainstream America, the values all of us grew up with -- opportunity, responsibility, hard work.

There's a fundamental difference between his vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth. He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure everybody has the chance to be an owner.

For a man who made responsibility the theme of his campaign, this president sure doesn't seem to value it much in office. We've lost 3.1 million private sector jobs. Over $3 trillion in stock market value lost. A $5.6 trillion budget surplus gone, and nearly $5 trillion of red ink in its place. Bill Clinton spent 8 years turning around 12 years of his predecessors' deficits. George Bush erased it in two years, and this year will break the all-time record.

Yet even with all those zeroes, the true cost of the administration's approach isn't what they've done with our money, it's what they want to do to our way of life. Their economic vision has one goal: to get rid of taxes on unearned income and shift the tax burden onto people who work. This crowd wants a world where the only people who have to pay taxes are the ones who do the work.

Make no mistake: this is the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago. Like socialism, it corrupts the very nature of our democracy and our free enterprise tradition. It is not a plan to grow the American economy. It is a plan to corrupt the American economy and shrink the winners' circle.

This is a question of values, not taxes. We should cut taxes, but we shouldn't cut and run from our values when we do. John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan argued for tax cuts as an incentive for people to work harder: Americans work hard, and the government shouldn't punish them when they do.

This crowd is making a radically different argument. They don't believe work matters most. They don't believe in helping working people build wealth. They genuinely believe that the wealth of the wealthy matters most. They are determined to cut taxes on that wealth, year after year, and heap more and more of the burden on people who work.

How do we know this? Because they don't even try to hide it. The Bush budget proposed tax-free tax shelters for millionaires that are bigger than most Americans' paychecks for an entire year. And just last week, Bush's tax guru, Grover Norquist, said their goal is to abolish the capital gains tax, abolish the dividend tax, and let the wealthiest shelter as much as they want tax-free. . . .

In these times of national sacrifice, we should not be asking less of the most fortunate. I agree with Bill Gates, Sr., the father of the richest man in America, that in a world where taxes must be paid, the people who inherit massive estates ought to pay taxes too. I agree with Warren Buffett, the shrewd investor and another of America's richest men, who said that something is deeply wrong when a billionaire has a lower tax rate than his secretary. . . .

Mr. President, I challenge you. Explain why you think a multimillionaire should pay 15% on his next million, while a fireman has to pay over 30% for each extra dollar of overtime. Mr. President, explain how you square that with America's values.

Assertions by Washington-based Pentagon officials that the current force is large enough don't square with reports from the field, which depict a steadily mounting conflict as well as sinking morale among some U.S. units exhausted after months of hard duty. Nor are the Pentagon's reports about the recruitment of allied forces encouraging: Though 70 nations have been contacted, only about 10 have made concrete commitments, and the number of non-U.S. troops is due to rise only from 12,000 to 20,000 by the end of summer. The poor support is a direct result of the administration's poor diplomacy, both before and after the war -- and, in particular, its insistence on monopolizing control over Iraq while mostly excluding the United Nations. India and Pakistan, for example, are reluctant to deploy troops under U.S. rather than U.N. command, and European countries have been slower to supply aid and advisers who could be assisting with reconstruction.