That link is found in the high moral and intellectual seriousness needed to arrive at the decision to go to war. And the fact is that the administration's deliberations and arguments have not even come close to the necessary threshold. Here the uncertainty of the American people, as well as the rest of the world, is a vital indicator. They are not afraid of Saddam Hussein: If they were, they would be clamoring for war. They recognize that he poses a threat, but it is a distant one. Their wisdom derives from the oldest human instinct: to believe that history is a guide, that events are predictable, that someone will not do something he has not done before. They recognize that they could be wrong: when dealing with hypotheticals, no arguments can be definitive. But they are also painfully aware of risk.

The Bush administration, and its faithful valet across the pond, insists that the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein is so great and so imminent that we must kill thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of people to get rid of him. But they have not given compelling reasons for war. And although their crystal ball works perfectly when assessing the evil that Saddam will do, it suddenly goes dark when it comes to predicting the evil that removing him could do, or even how much money it will cost.

One cannot reach the place of honesty required to answer the question whether war is required if one does not first accept what war means, and look long and hard down that hellish road. Nor can one do so without examining one's previous beliefs about the threat posed by Saddam. Those who simply transfer rage at the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11 onto Saddam are not acting in good faith.

And here Auden's words are useful. What the poet is calling for is not quietism, not turning the other cheek, but making the painful attempt to see beyond oneself, to recognize the Other as fully human. This vision, to borrow Stendhal's description of the temperament needed by the novelist, is clear, dry, without illusion. But if Auden rejects bleeding-heart sentimentality, the habitual pitfall of the left, he also rejects the variant favored by the right, brutal sentimentality. And it is precisely a species of brutal sentimentality that lies behind the bizarre, almost unnoticed sleight-of-hand trick successfully pulled off by Bush: transferring Americans' rage at al-Qaida into rage at Saddam Hussein.

Behind the vulgar flag-waving bombast of the mass media, behind the pro-war chest-beating or too-little, too-late reservations of the nation's leading newspapers, behind the embarrassing attempts to blame the Bush administration's worldwide isolation on the French, there is a great hollowness -- the sinking, empty feeling that follows the dissemination and absorption of a Big National Lie.

The lie is the claim that the threat to America posed by Saddam Hussein is so urgent that only immediate war can stop it. What is noteworthy about this lie is not just that there are no convincing arguments for it, not just that it depends on gross appeals to emotions stirred by a completely unrelated event, but that most of those who have accepted it have no intellectual justification in doing so.

I propose the following axiom: Those who did not believe and publicly state before Sept. 11 that Saddam Hussein represented an unacceptable threat to the United States have no credibility when they now argue that he does.

The reasoning behind this axiom is simple: The events of Sept. 11 have no relevance to the threat posed by Iraq, nor has any new information been unearthed since then about Iraqi threats. Therefore, all those who are only now calling for the U.S. to invade Iraq are basing their change of heart purely on an emotional reaction to Sept. 11, not a reasoned analysis of risk factors. This is an argument made in bad faith. For 10 years they were not afraid of Saddam Hussein. What changed their mind? The fiery spectacle of Sept. 11, they claim. Bush has invoked the date repeatedly as he has tried to scare Americans into supporting his war. But try as they might, none of these hawks in or out of the Bush government has been able to prove a connection between Osama bin Laden's spectacular assaults and the Baghdad regime.

That this obvious point has scarcely been raised indicates the extent to which emotion, not argument, has come to dominate public discussion of this issue. The patriotic intimidation, the groupthink, the shunning and shaming of those who dared to raise unpopular perspectives -- these reflexes still govern the national dialogue on Iraq.

This helps explain why it is not acceptable to question whether even al-Qaida, whose all-powerful, demonic nature must constantly be invoked to prop up war with Iraq, is as powerful, resourceful and threatening as is believed. Obviously, it represents a very serious threat, and all necessary resources must be devoted to hunting it down and destroying it. But it is not necessarily correct to assume that the true strength and significance of a terrorist movement is equal to the success it enjoys in a given operation.

Of course, emotional reactions can be valuable. U.S. intelligence agencies knew for years that bin Laden and his associates were responsible for terrorist attacks against U.S. targets; they failed to act effectively. Sept. 11 served as a wake-up call, and no one would argue that it should not have.

But Iraq, according to CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, whose well-researched pro-war book "The Threatening Storm" has probably been cited by more born-again liberal hawks than any other, had nothing to do with Sept. 11, or indeed with al-Qaida, and very little to do with international terrorism in general. As Pollack and most other analysts have noted, handing weapons of mass destruction out to people he can't control is not Saddam's style. The position of the CIA itself, until director George Tenet was taken away and retrofitted with a new pro-war sound system, embarrassingly contradicted Bush's agenda: The agency said it was unlikely that Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction unless an invasion forced him into a corner.

Let us be impolitic enough to recall the universal assessment of Saddam Hussein before 9/11 -- an assessment borne out by studies of Iraq from Kanan Makiya's "Republic of Fear" to Khidhir Hamza and Jeff Stein's "Saddam's Bombmaker." The picture that emerges is of an appallingly vicious Stalinist thug, a murderous despot who has some pan-Arab leadership pretensions, and a vicious hatred of Jews and Israel, but whose overriding instincts are to expand and consolidate his own power and save his own skin. There is nothing in his sordid résumé to indicate that he would support an al-Qaida-like group in terror actions against the U.S.: He is too much of a survivor, too pragmatic and too secular to trade the messianic, apocalyptic joys of killing Americans for the likelihood that the connection would be discovered and his head consequently impaled by the 101st Airborne on the gates of Baghdad. (For that matter, in the current climate, even if no such connection was discovered, Saddam might well still answer for it. Which is why there is reason to believe that if he had anything to say about it, all terror actions against the U.S. would cease immediately.)

Saddam is delusional, not mad: He strikes when he thinks he can get away with it. He believed he could defeat Iran, not least because the U.S. was backing him. (In 1983 the United States knew Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iran: The Reagan administration not only raised no objection, it sought closer ties and soon restored diplomatic relations. Reagan's Middle East envoy at the time: Donald Rumsfeld. They can be seen amiably shaking hands in an old news photo in wide circulation on the Web. These kinds of facts make it difficult to have complete faith in the high humanitarian pronouncements of the Bush administration -- which is not to say that the liberation of the Iraqi people would not be a great good.) Saddam thought he could get away with invading Kuwait (which he regarded, with some reason, as a part of historic Iraq that was artificially broken off by the British when they carved up the Ottoman Empire) in part because of the infamous "yellow light" given him by the senior Bush's ambassador, April Glaspie, and in part because of his own megalomaniacal fantasies and shaky grasp of external political realities.

The most dangerous things about this rather classic paranoid, sociopathic despot are his delusions and his lack of good information about the outside world. But there is no reason to believe either of these things makes him an imminent threat to the U.S. His delusions are those of a cunning man, too cunning to assure his own doom by handing weapons to terrorists; his lack of information leads him to do stupid things like drag his feet on inspections, but not self-destructive ones like attacking the U.S. For me, the most scary scenario in Pollack's book is that on his deathbed, Saddam might launch missiles at Tel Aviv. But a nation cannot base its foreign policy on trying to stave off theoretically possible future threats. Nor is it America's duty to make war on Iraq, and risk its own national self-interest, to protect Israel: Israel has shown itself quite capable of dealing with him in the past.

The administration has made crude, increasingly desperate attempts to tout connections between Saddam and al-Qaida, including wildly overdrawn claims that his sketchy relationship with the anti-Kurdish Islamist group Ansar Al-Islam proves his connection to al-Qaida. (The campaign may have reached its humiliating nadir when Colin Powell tried to use Osama bin Laden's latest tape, in which he called for Muslims to rally around Iraq against America while denouncing Saddam as godless, to connect the two -- a line of argument worthy of the Michael Savage show, but one that may be effective with that large percentage of Americans who believe that Osama is Saddam.)

So why, absent any connection between Osama and Saddam, would Sept. 11 have served as a wake-up call about Iraq? It apparently had that effect on many influential voices in the media, including the New York Times' editorial page, their influential foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and the editorial page of the Washington Post. (The Times, which was calling for war just a few weeks ago, has since reversed course. Alarmed by the world's rejection of the plan, and perhaps having second thoughts about the national security arguments it had earlier accepted, in the last few weeks the editors went first into an awkward semi-retreat, then reversed course and explicitly came out against it Sunday. Friedman, too, has been changing his tune, although his case is slightly different because his enthusiasm for the war has been based less on national security arguments than on the idealistic hope that a democratic Iraq could help rebuild the region. Why it took Friedman so long to realize that the Bush administration was not a trustworthy instrument to execute this noble goal is a mystery.) In any case, the fact remains that these extraordinarily important commentators all accepted Bush's plan to invade Iraq -- a position none of them had held before Sept. 11. The only logical explanation for their change of heart is that only after Sept. 11 did they realize the gravity of Saddam's threat. Sept. 11, by this line of reasoning, was just a catalyst: somehow the arsonist who tossed a firebomb through the front window made them remember that they had left a convicted murderer in the unlocked basement.

If this is actually what happened to the reborn hawks, it's at least a defensible position. And perhaps it is -- although none of them, as far as I know, have issued any mea culpas for ignoring, for 10 years, a threat to America's security so great that only launching an incredibly risky war right now, without any delay, can remove it.

It seems more likely that what really happened, not just to the media but to the spineless Democratic Party and to the country as a whole, was a little less respectable. The fact is that the rush to invade Iraq simply exemplifies, on a huge, international scale, that old slogan "A neoconservative is a liberal who got mugged." We got mugged on Sept. 11, so we have to lock up all those criminal bastards, whether they were the ones who stole our wallet or not. War on Iraq is like California's barbaric, yet so gratifying, "three strikes" law, just upheld by the five justices on the Supreme Court who brought us the Bush presidency. You shoplifted three golf clubs -- 25 years. Al-Qaida is scaring us -- invade Baghdad.

This is the triumph of brutal sentimentality: the boozy appeal of raw anger, unreflective rage -- a populist version of what Nietzsche called ressentiment. It has long been the favorite rally-the-troops appeal of the right wing of the Republican Party. And, dressed up as "moral clarity," it worked: America is pursuing a war policy that could have been drawn up by those yahoos who chant and sing "Burn 'em!" while executions take place. It is a commonplace that the reason we have laws is so that the injured parties, whose passions understandably cloud their judgment, do not decide the fate of the accused. But we now have a policy that enacts the psychological fantasies of, and draws much of its support from, the angry-victim wing of the Republican right -- red-faced white men filled with rage, slavering and clamoring to hang 'em high.

Revenge, of course, is not the principal motive driving Bush. There are several. With his domestic agenda a disaster, his popularity plummeting (the latest poll has him losing to an "unnamed Democrat" by four points), and his administration slowly bleeding to death in the Security Council, he has no political choice except to roll the dice on war. He seems to have convinced himself that Saddam really does pose a threat. And he has big geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East -- some concerning oil, some about defending Israel and placing it in a stronger position to dictate terms to the Palestinians, and perhaps some genuinely well-meaning ones about freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny and setting the region on a better course. Nonetheless, revenge disguised as self-defense (or, in down-market Republican circles, self-defense dressed up as revenge) is what he's using to sell the war. It helps that Bush is from Texas, home of all-American ressentiment.

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