We never did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Although we found old artillery shells with traces of sarin gas and other chemicals, we have yet to discover any of the chemical or biological stockpiles we thought we would discover there. Yet President Bush still won reelection.

We live today in an era of danger much like the Cold War. Except for a ten-year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the World Trade Center, foreign policy and defense-related issues have been a staple of American elections from World War II through the present. The nineties were a false respite when our elections turned mostly inward, with foreign affairs, terrorism, and defense spending relegated to second- or third-tier issues in the minds of the voters. September 11 changed our nation's focus much the way Pearl Harbor did.

In 2004, voters who worried about terrorism and keeping America safe voted overwhelmingly to reelect President Bush, despite our failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and despite numerous attacks on the President for deceiving our nation and lying our way into war.

I said, from the White House podium, on many occasions that we knew Saddam Hussein possessed chemical weapons. I said we knew Saddam possessed biological weapons.

Why did I say it?

I said it because it was the best judgement of the career intelligence analysts who serve our nation. I said it because my boss, President George W. Bush, said it, just as President Clinton had said it before him, and just as Vice President Gore said it. Senator John Kerry said it as well in a speech on the Senate floor in 2002. According to the arms inspector David Kay, France in the 1990s concluded Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and so did Germany. The United Nations also thought it was true.

If we all said it, then what happened? Where are these weapons of mass destruction?

It seems to me only four things could have happened. One is Saddam moved them out of Iraq before the war without us knowing it. Two is Saddam destroyed them and left no evidence behind. Three is that he hid them somewhere in Iraq and we've yet to discover them. Four is that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction and we were all wrong.

David Kay, the former UN chief weapons inspector and head of the Iraq Survey Group that was sent by the U.S. government to search for weapons of mass detruction after the war, said we may all have been wrong. He reported we had not found any stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

That was the honest assessment of an honest man. But it wasn't all that David Kay reported. His statement commanded attention, and it dominated the headlines. But as always, there was more to the news than the headlines. Here's what else David Kay said when he submitted his report to Congress in October 2003:

"We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that begain in late 2002."

These included "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe-houses maintained by the Iraqi intelligence service. 'Reference strains' of biological organisms, concealed in a scientist's home, including a live strain of deadly botulinum, and new research on Brucella, Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, ricin and aflatoxin.

"In the chemical and biological weapons area we have confidence that there were at minimum clandestine on-going research and development activities that were embedded in the Iraqi Intelilgence Service," Kay reported.

On Janurary 28, 2004, when David Kay, the man who said we hadn't found any weapons of mass destruction, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said, "If you read the total body of intelligence in the last twelve to fifteen years that flowed out of Iraq, I quite frankly think it would be hard to come to a conclusion other than Iraq was a gathering, serious threat to the world with regard to WMD.... I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein. I have said I actually think this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought."

In other words, Kay said we did not find actual weapons of mass destruction. Instead, we found an ongoing, active reasearch and development effort to create chemical and biological weapons, even while the UN inspectors were in Iraq, hidden in scientists' homes.

Charles Duelfer, who succeeded Kay, confirmed in October 2004 that no weapons of mass destruction were found. He reported, however, that at the beginning of 2003 Saddam probably had the capability to produce mustard agent within six months and nerve agents in significant quantities within two years.

What purpose could there be for Saddam to pursue these weapons in violation of international law? I don't think they were for "peaceful purposes," not in the hands of Saddam and his sons, Qusai and Odai.

Saddam pledged as the price for ending the 1991 Gulf War to abandon his pursuit of weaponry, particularly weapons of mass destruction. But he didn't.

The Bush adminsitration may have beeon wrong about Saddam's actual capabilities, but we weren't wrong about his intentions. To this day, I believe it was only a matter of time before Saddam would have confronted the West, Israel included, with weapons of mass destruction. He had a history of using the weapons he possessed, and he had a history of aggression against his neighbors. He attacked Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. I don't think he was contained or constrained; he was biding his time.

If this war wasn't fought in 2003, it was only a matter of time until it would have had to have been fought, this time against an enemy that probably would have had weapons of mass destruction and would have used them against our military forces. Critics who accept Kay's and Duelfer's conclusion that Saddam didn't have active weapons of mass destruction can't dismiss the finding the at he was developing them.

Particularly after we learned, on Spetember 11, how vulnerable we are to a suprise attack, could an American president take a chance that Saddam Hussein either had or was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction without confronting him? If I and others in the administration had never said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, even though we had good reason to believe it at the time, and instead said he had an ongoing, active research and development effort to obtain chemical and biological weapons, that alone in my judgment would have been reason to go to war. For the safety of the American people, we couldn't let Saddam possess weapons of mass destruction, nor could we let him seek them, hoping that he somehow never obtained them, or once he obtained them he wouldn't use them. Saddam was a unique threat, and so were his ruthless sons. They're threats no more.

As divided as America became over the war, I think back to what Czech President Havel and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel told the President. If only action had been taken in 1938 or 1939, World War II could have been averted, they said. Winston Churchill was seen by many in Europe at the time as a militarist not interested in peace. If the world had taken military action in the 1930s, I'm sure some would have said that Hitler wasn't the threat Churchill claimed him to be. They would have caviled: Lives would have been lost, and for what reason? Who will rebuild Germany? Isn't it a mess?

We'll never know if President Bush, along with Britain's Tony Blair and the eladers of Spain, Italy, Poland, Austrailia, and many of our east European allies, averted a third world war by deposing Saddam before he possessed and used weapons of mass destruction. It would have been fanciful to think in 1938 that World War II could have been averted had the **** threat been removed before it fully materialized.

We may not know, but I sleep better at night knowing that the risk posed by Saddam is gone and that the man who gave $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers will never again be in a position to give them, or anyone, aid or comfort. The risk is gone, and I feel the world is better because of it.