THE REAL KILLER

In March, as war loomed, the Bush administration rejected talks with Iraqis seeking peace on behalf of Saddam Hussein, The New York Times said today. The White House apparently decided against the entreaties “after a decade of evasions and deceptions by Iraq,” although nowhere in the article is it made clear that the United States didn’t believe what it was hearing.

It’s obviously appalling that all avenues to prevent war weren’t explored (“The message was, ‘Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad,’ ” according to Richard Perle, the White House adviser and Times source), but equally striking is the consistency of the claims that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

That’s what the Iraqi faction told Perle in March, matching what Hussein’s brother-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told U.S. and British intelligence agents in 1995, but it made no difference whether the information matched up or not, whether it came from an Iraqi official or an Iraqi defector -- or even United Nations weapons inspectors. (As Cambridge University scholar Glen Rangwala noted in June, “There is no UN report after 1994 that claims that Iraq continued to possess weapons of mass destruction.”)

Coupled with the administration’s willful misinterpretation of data and analysis provided by the United Nations and intelligence agencies, and with a new thoughtfulness and urgency provided by the ongoing U.S. deaths in Iraq, I wonder if we’re not all at the point of acknowledging that the president simply wanted this war? And that it may be time to rethink our approach to the, um, peace?

At the very least, let’s please end the search for the WMDs, that staggering waste of money and military effort.

I’m dreaming, of course. There’s no way the search will end. It will go on, and on, it will never stop -- not until we locate those weapons and, guarding them, the heavily armed, half-crazed real killer of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman.