President George Bush doesn't seem concerned that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. We found a couple of trucks, he said recently, as if two abandoned trucks without a trace of either chemical or biological weapons in them justified the war.

Whether he realizes it or not, it is a serious matter. If it turns out that the United States and Great Britain went to war on the basis of falsehoods or defective intelligence, there will and ought to be some political fallout. Both the British Parliament and some American legislators are demanding an investigation.

One serious aspect of this matter is that I would hate to think that the president is so contemptuous of the American people that he doesn't mind at all deceiving them. That would indicate that he simply can't be trusted, a very serious situation for a president. It's also oddly reminiscent of his father's refusal to apologize for breaking his no-new-taxes promise, as if the Great Ones needn't bother themselves with what the common folk think. The elder Bush discovered that it did matter at the very next election.

If it's an intelligence failure, that, too, is very serious. The president has enunciated a policy of pre-emptive strikes against any country he thinks might have weapons of mass destruction and might be a future threat to the United States.

Well, if he thinks a country has weapons of mass destruction, it will be because of intelligence. He personally isn't going to go snooping around foreign countries. Because war is so serious a business, if a nation is going to war because its president thinks a country has weapons of mass destruction, then by God and for certain sure, the intelligence agencies had better (A.) know these weapons really do exist and (B.) know where they are.

We have discovered, in the case of Iraq, that the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the little cabal put together by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld obviously did not know the correct answers to either A or B. They did not know if such weapons existed, and they darn sure did not know where they were. One American officer talking to a Newsweek reporter described the list of probable weapons sites supplied by the CIA as "garbage."

I personally don't think there are any weapons of mass destruction. Several Iraqi officials who would know if they existed and where they are have been in U.S. custody for weeks. They have no incentive whatsoever to cover up; they all know neither they nor Saddam Hussein will ever be in power again. They know their necks are on the line. They are at the mercy of the United States, and they could be facing death or long terms of imprisonment. They have every incentive in the world to spill the beans. Unfortunately, if there are no beans, you can't spill them, even if you want to.

And every one of these officials has said the same thing: There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There also are no al-Qaida terrorists or any other active terrorists connected to Saddam Hussein. In short, it appears that Iraq was in fact not an "imminent danger" to the world and to the United States, as the president and his men so adamantly insisted that it was.

Now the administration is starting on Iran, insisting that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons and harboring terrorists. But if it was dead wrong about Iraq, why should we believe anything it says about Iran? Why should intelligence so off the mark in Iraq be on the mark in Iran? Which government has more credibility at this point — ours or Iran's? It turns out that in the case of Iraq, the Iraqis were telling the truth when they said they had no weapons, and our government was either lying or grossly mistaken when it insisted that Iraq did have such weapons.

War is too immoral, too homicidal and too expensive to be undertaken on the basis of speculation derived from a faulty intelligence.