SO HOW DANGEROUS IS HE?

Despite Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's constant tease that the Administration will soon flash hot new information, there appears to be nothing in U.S. intelligence reports showing that Iraq has made so great a leap forward in its dangerous arsenal as to require an immediate invasion. As the National Security Council sifts through what it can publish to persuade the public, its chief, Condoleezza Rice, is advising her colleagues that "there's no smoking gun." In lieu of that, the let's-roll camp emphasizes—as one Administration official put it—"what we do have that's new adds to the whole narrative of the story." The hawks mean that to assess the risk properly, Saddam's weapons potential must be laid alongside the dictator's well-known nasty past. The way they see it, Saddam already has all the weapons of mass destruction he needs to pose an intolerable threat—because he would use them, personally or by terrorist proxy. They point out that he used chemicals against Iran during his eight-year war with his neighbor, and he gassed 50,000 to 100,000 rebellious Kurds inside his own country. Saddam may be contained "in his box" for now, but he is not likely to stay there: deterrence, which kept the cold war cold, simply won't work with someone this "evil."

But can Saddam, even with a nuclear weapon or two, really dominate the oil-rich Middle East or blackmail the U.S., as Cheney has warned? In the region these days, he's generally considered less, not more dangerous. In his refusal to give up his weapons and thus release Iraq from U.N. sanctions, he has beggared his country. His conventional forces are so degraded and demoralized that he can't invade another nation. He might try to subjugate his neighbors just by threatening a nuclear attack. But the threat would be weakened by the knowledge that if he ever dared use a bomb, it would provoke Washington to destroy him. That leaves Saddam with few ways to make his cache pay off. Many experts say the day the U.S. invades is the day Saddam will unleash his weapons. It would be his moment to use them or lose them. If lethal toxins and gases failed to stop the onslaught, they might at least cause a fair number of American casualties. But most vulnerable to Saddam's arsenal are those who have always been his chief victims: Iraqi civilians.

Saddam could offer some of his bio-germs to a terrorist proxy—not for strategic gain but, presumably, just to get even for the Gulf War. He showed a taste for revenge when he dispatched assassins to kill the first President Bush during Bush's visit to Kuwait two years after the Gulf War. If Saddam manages one day to build a crude nuclear device, he's still far from having the technology to make a small, transportable weapon that terrorists could deploy. Saddam could give chemical agents to a third party, but, says David Kay, another former U.N. inspection leader, "chemical weapons are very hard to use in a terrorist scenario because the physical amount that has to be used must be huge." A biological weapon like anthrax would make the easiest hand-off package. Yet if Saddam lent terrorists his pathogens to use against the U.S., Washington might well find out, and Saddam could reasonably expect a crushing retaliation that would end his regime, if not his life.

Up to now, though, Saddam has never been detected sharing his weapons with others, and few who study him closely see signs that he would. Although a segment of the Bush Administration has tried diligently to tie him tight to al-Qaeda to justify launching a war on Iraq, they have failed to make public their facts.

For the post-9/11 Bush Administration, the maybe-nots pale in comparison with the maybes. Bush is proposing a doctrine of pre-emption that claims the right and the duty to invade another country—not based on a clear and present danger but on what he sees as an equally clear and future danger. By nature and tradition, Americans shy from pre-emptive strikes. The U.S. way has been to take on aggression after it has happened.

For this Administration, the Twin Towers attacks stood that principle on its head. "If the U.S. could have pre-empted 9/11, we would have, no question," said Cheney. "Should we be able to prevent another, much more devastating attack, we will, no question." Or, as one senior official puts it, "if we wait for a smoking gun, we'll have a mushroom cloud."

So George Bush doesn't need any Cuba-style pictures to prove Saddam is an intolerable risk. He knows it "no doubt," as Cheney repeated. Now the rest of the world has to decide if it does too.

—Reported by John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller/Washington and J.F.O. McAllister/London

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