Whether Saddam had WMD was never the question.

President George W. Bush wants us to believe that since a great many people considered Saddam likely to have WMD in the winter of 2003, those people must have agreed with his rationale for war. Now that is rewriting history.

Looking back at the evidence, much of it still available on the Web for anyone who cares to look, it seems clear that the majority opinion in January 2003 was that Saddam had some WMD somewhere in Iraq. It also looks as though that opinion was eroding as the weeks passed and nothing was found. However, there's no getting around the fact that many people thought he had them. Looking at his archives, Juan Cole, hardly a fan of the war, appears to be saying that not finding WMD, although possible and worth considering, was still speculation.

What separated George W. Bush from most of the rest of the world's leaders at the time was his willingness to invade a sovereign nation based on hunches. As his supporters keep saying, this is a global war on terror and what better idea do you have?

In an active Washington Post blog this morning, a number of people took up that challenge. Finding Osama bin Laden, fixing Afghanistan, etc. Personally, I don't know about either of those. My guess is that Osama is semi-retired. We give him too much credit if we think he can pull a lot of strings from a location in Pakistan which, almost by definition since we can't find it, has no modern communications. Dead or alive, who cares? And while reconstructing Afghanistan may be an admirable goal, I don't see that worldwide terror has risen because we haven't.

But the question posed a false challenge. Are opponents of the war obliged to devise more effective positive actions? I don't think the alternatives mentioned were really dependent on Iraq. For instance, we haven't found bin Laden because we haven't invaded Pakistan to find him. The reasons not to do so are the same with or without Iraq.

The alternative to invading Iraq was not finding bin Laden. The alternative to invading Iraq was not invading Iraq. It was clear how we could contain his threat; ongoing inspections. We would have done just as well in preventing terror attacks, probably better, and it would have been a lot cheaper than half a trillion dollars.