TUESDAY, May 21, 2002 — The recent uproar over the Bush administration’s pre–September 11 knowledge of the threat of Al Qaeda highjackings is completely warranted. As the tag-line for the recently concluded Fox Network program The X-Files puts it: the truth was out there.

Just as the truth that Osama bin Laden posed a grave danger to the United States was known by intelligence authorities prior to September 11, the same is true of Saddam Hussein of Iraq. It’s possible to imagine a scenario where the Iraqi dictator completes his ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons programs, launches nuclear missiles against, say, Los Angeles, and thus destroys the city. At that point the press and the opposition party will begin to raise questions about what the government knew and when it knew it.

And those questions will be beside the point. We all know that Hussein is working on a nuclear-weapons program. A nuclear scientist who used to work for Hussein, Khidhir Hamza, makes that clear in his book, Saddam’s Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda. We all know that Hussein has used unconventional weapons against both his own people, the Iraqi Kurds, and another country, Iran. And we know that he hates the United States, having once tried to kill former president George H.W. Bush. So the exact type of debate we're having about the Bush administration’s pre–September 11 activity — or rather, lack thereof — we could someday have about Iraq.

That brings me to a second point. The Boston Globe today runs a story headlined " US PLANS LEADERSHIP OF POST-HUSSEIN IRAQ. " The thrust of the story is that the administration plans to move away from its " long-standing reliance " on the Iraqi National Congress and will begin to support a wider range of Iraqi opposition figures. The story quotes David Mack, vice-president of the Middle East Institute, which has had a hand in forging the administration's new blueprint, as urging greater concentration on nation-building. " Let’s not make the same mistake we did in Afghanistan when we had boots on the ground before we had the civil affairs side in place," he says. "How do you deal with refugees, how do you deal with questions of justice? "

As rational as Mack’s statements may seem, they are impractical and nonsensical, and they don’t bode well for any future action against Hussein. If his thinking prevailed in Afghanistan, American bureaucrats would still be dithering around about " questions of justice, " while the Taliban maintained its iron grip on the country and bin Laden had complete freedom of movement. Instead the Taliban is out of power and bin Laden is greatly weakened, ailing, and operating in the shadows.

Beyond this, the entire Globe report misses the real story — one known to anyone who has followed the Iraqi National Congress for an extended period of time. That story has been one of repeated betrayal on the part of the US government. It’s a story that will rival or surpass that of the pre–September 11 intelligence failings, if and when Hussein strikes again. In 1993, Vice-President Al Gore sent a letter to the Iraqi National Congress (INC) vowing to protect the Democratic dissident group against Hussein’s forces. The US government broke that commitment in 1996, when Iraqi tanks rolled into the INC-controlled city of Irbil. If we had stood behind the INC then, Hussein might not be in power today. When attention focused on Hussein again in the fall of 1998, after he ejected United Nations arms inspectors, President Bill Clinton signed (with overwhelming congressional support) the Iraq Liberation Act, which stated US resolve to overthrow Hussein through close work with the Iraqi National Congress.

The only problem was that in the ensuing years, the US government concentrated on two things: revamping the INC into a more diverse, broad-based body that represented more voices in the Iraqi opposition movement (a move that some at the time believed would render it ineffective); and producing policy proposals on what a future Iraq would look like, including what kind of water system it would have, how Iraqis would be educated, and how intragroup governance would work. In short, the US required the INC to do everything Mack is now talking about. Everything, of course, except the most pressing agenda of doing away with Hussein.

As someone who has watched for 10 years as State Department bureaucrats and hacks from nonprofit groups have dilly-dallied around Iraq question, the news that the Bush administration is beginning to focus — yet again — on the details of a post-Hussein infrastructure is not encouraging. Until the US gets " boots on the ground " in Iraq, in fact, the chances that a doomsday scenario like the one outlined above will come to pass only grows more serious. Avoiding the next horror, this time in Iraq, ought to be a major goal of the Bush administration.