By David Polhemus
Advertiser Editorial Writer

The Bush administration has mounted a full-court press to convince the country that what David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group have found in their so-far futile quest for weapons of mass destruction is solid justification for the war launched against that country in March.

You might ask yourself why Kay's interim report, delivered to Congress Oct. 2, wasn't trusted to speak for itself (edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/10/02/kay.report).

Bear in mind that Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector who has about 1,400 people working for him — including spies, intelligence analysts, scientists, weapons experts, linguists, laboratory technicians, computer experts and soldiers — no doubt feels constrained to justify the $300 million his group has spent in its first 90 days of work. The Bush administration is seeking an additional $600 million to keep him in the hunt.

That said, Kay's report generally informs us of what we already knew: that Saddam Hussein has always wanted weapons of mass destruction, in some cases has continued to try to obtain them, and certainly would have — if it hadn't been for the constraints of U.N. sanctions and inspections.

Bush, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, calls the Kay report proof that Saddam posed a "danger to the world" with a WMD program that "spanned more than two decades."

Well, yes. As it turns out, most of Saddam's WMD activity occurred before the first Gulf War, in 1991 — when no one was stopping him. His well-known gassing of a Kurdish village, for instance, was in 1988. Consider this key sentence from Kay's report:

"Multiple sources with varied access and reliability have told (the Iraq Survey Group) that Iraq did not have a large, ongoing centrally controlled (chemical weapons) program after 1991. ... Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced — if not entirely destroyed — during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox (Clinton's 1998 air strikes), 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections."

This is, of course, exactly what U.N. inspectors had been telling us before the war. Iraq at the start of this year did not present an "imminent threat" to the United States, as President Bush said — and still says — it did.

That point is important as it becomes increasingly clear that Bush went to war not as a pre-emptive measure (defined by the Department of Defense as "an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent"), as he said; but as a "preventive" war (to counter potential, future, even speculative threats).

("America is following a new strategy," Bush said Thursday before leaving for Asia. "We are not waiting for further attacks. We are striking our enemies before they can strike us again." In interviews, he made clear that those enemies include Islamic terrorists in Indonesia and the Philippines.)

A well-known example of preventive war was in 1941, when Japan, paranoid about the potential American threat to its expanding empire, attacked Pearl Harbor.

Fast-forward to 1962. "When the Kennedy administration," wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "was wrestling with the threat of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended removing the missiles by preventive attack. Robert Kennedy called the Joint Chiefs' idea 'Pearl Harbor in reverse.' He added, 'For 175 years we had not been that kind of country.' "

The so-called "neo-cons" who today advise Bush had long publicly lobbied for "regime change" in Iraq — first in a 1996 paper prepared for Israeli hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu, and then in 1998, in a letter to President Clinton.

More and more commentators are concluding that the Iraq card acquired new urgency and attractiveness after 9-11. Suddenly it became evident the West could no longer depend on two-faced Saudi Arabia, which underwrites radical Islamists and supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers, to anchor the security of energy supplies on which the industrial world depends.

A new design emerged to rebuild the Middle East on a new axis: Israel and Turkey on the west, India on the east, and cooperative Iraq and Afghanistan in between. Syria, Pakistan (an ally only as long as Gen. Pervez Musharraf presides) and Iran would then be surrounded and isolated.

"The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfeld said in July. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light — through the prism of our experience on 9-11."

Apart from Bush's public, now badly battered reasons for the war, there appears to be an underlying, realpolitik approach to the Middle East reminiscent of the failed English and French effort between the world wars to control the region's oil through strategic colonialism.

It's an approach that hasn't received the sort of public discussion required of a democracy, nor is it one — especially given rising costs in terms of both lives and treasure — that many Americans would share.

Reach David Polhemus through letters@honoluluadvertiser.com.