It is Thursday of last week, early in the morning. Baghdad, the war-torn city on the Tigris River, is fast asleep. It is a quarter to two. But 140 kilometer northwest of the Iraqi capital, the sky is opening for a deadly attack.

US aircraft dive to horizontal positions. They blanket a desert camp with bombs, and then special forces of the 101st Airborne Division advance on the position.

An Apache helicopter crashes during the fighting. Farther to the south, an American F-16 fighter-bomber crashes to the ground.

A few seconds later, as the smoke clears, General David McKiernan is bursting with satisfaction. He says that a "large group of enemy combatants" were killed during the bombing, supporters of the ousted despot Saddam Hussein, who has gone into hiding, paramilitary troops, probably including Syrian and Jordanian volunteers. The men who allegedly prepared the attacks against allied troops are "irregular fighters" and, therefore, "terrorists." The US supreme command considers the events of the night to be one of the largest and deadliest operations of the past few weeks.

But this self-confidence has already evaporated by the next day. A group of Iraqis armed with bazookas confronts American tanks north of Baghdad. 27 attackers are killed during a battle that lasts several hours. Is this the beginning of the "guerilla war," announced by Saddam supporters in May, "that will wear down the Americans"?

43 days after President George W. Bush declared the end of hostilities in Iraq, the supreme civil administrator in the Anglo-American protectorate, Paul Bremer, is forced to dejectedly concede the following: "There is still war in parts of the country." Nothing seems to be true anymore about the American saying that war is waged three times: first during the dispute surrounding the need for war, then during the war itself, and then during the dispute surrounding its significance.

The Iraq war has become the exception to the rule, not just because the fighting has truly not ended, Saddam has not been caught, and the country is not at peace. The third phase - normally a fait accompli, since the victor is in control of interpreting the war - isn't working anymore.

That's because George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the commanders-in-chief, find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to provide evidence, after the fact, of the need to wage war against Saddam. And this is something that, even ten weeks after the fall of Baghdad, they have yet to accomplish.

They are still talking about biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction Saddam is alleged to have stockpiled. In fact, the entire world had assumed that they existed - even Germany and France, which developed into the opponents of the preventive war instigated by the White House because they hoped that the work of the UN inspectors would lead to a peaceful resolution of this conflict.

Time after time, the American president dramatically conjured up the threats to peace in the Middle East and in the world that would exist as long as the Iraqi dictator "possesses and hides the deadliest weapons ever invented." The message being broadcast was that he could either use them himself or give them to terrorists, such as Osama Bin Laden. Bush' wartime ally, Tony Blair, seconded Bush' claims when he told the British House of Commons that Iraq had certainly not destroyed its "10,000 liters of anthrax and at least 80 tons of mustard gas and other biological weapons."

Meanwhile, 1400 inspectors from the United States, Australia and Great Britain have combed the entire country for Saddam's deadly arsenal. They have investigated 230 suspicious sites, including the same factories and laboratories their UN predecessors had already scrutinized. They have excavated a playground and taken apart a distillery, all because poison gas was supposedly hidden in one place or another. They have subjected Iraqi scientists, engineers and officials to lengthy interrogations to find out where Saddam could have hidden his weapons.

With the exception of two alleged mobile biological weapons laboratories, which President Bush rashly identified as the ultimate proof ("We have found the weapons of mass destruction"), no evidence of the secret production of banned weapons has turned up so far. The warheads containing biological and chemical agents, the stockpiles of anthrax, and the arsenals containing deadly VX gas have remained concealed.

Do any weapons of mass destruction exist, after all? Did Saddam hide them in his own country before the war began, or have them taken to another country or destroyed? Or did Bush, with Blair in his entourage, grossly exaggerate the danger, knowingly or unknowingly? Is the war for regime change in Iraq based on manipulation of the global public, misleading of the UN Security Council, or even a deliberate lie?

Alastair Campbell, Blair's information minister, has already been forced to apologize for a forged dossier, a dossier that the United States had praised as an "excellent report" before the UN. But even Bush now concedes "that the skepticism will continue until it becomes evident that there was indeed a weapons of mass destruction program."

It has become noticeable that the US president has adopted a new approach. He no longer uses a highly moralistic tone in speaking of Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction," instead referring to his "weapons program." Based on this logic, the discovery of instructions for building biological and chemical weapons would serve as sufficient evidence of Saddam's sinister intentions - and thus to justify the war retroactively.

In contrast, British Prime Minister Blair is sticking to his guns: "I have no doubt that irrefutable evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will be found," he says - precisely echoing his words prior to the war. And, like the American president, he too values the historical achievement that "Iraq now enjoys freedom, and we should be proud of that." In fact, the barbaric dictatorship that Saddam and his sons imposed on the country is gradually becoming evident. Recently discovered documents and witness testimony describe an image of horror.

When the UN inspectors were hunting for Saddam's weapons arsenal, Hans Blix and Mohammed al-Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency unsuccessfully asked for more time and confidence. The White House hurled abuse at the two and suggested that Saddam's thugs were making a fool of Blix.

Last week the otherwise exceedingly diplomatic Swede, who is resigning in late June, had this to say about his "slanderers in Washington": "There are bastards who plant ugly things in the media." Blix also disclosed that the Bush administration "put pressure on us." However, according to Blix, the intelligence material "that was supposed to prove the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was not very good." Blix was "somewhat upset" by this.

In an historic session of the UN Security Council in New York on February 5, US Secretary of State Colin Powell rigorously dismissed all doubts "that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and has the capacity to quickly produce more, many more. My colleagues, every statement that I make here today is supported by sources, solid sources."

Those who then opposed America's war resolution now feel, four months later, deeply confirmed in their convictions. However, Gabriel Valdes, the Chilean UN ambassador, or Sergey Lavrov, Moscow's envoy, are not interested in voicing their satisfaction publicly. Their colleagues from Spain and Bulgaria, both vehement proponents of the war, are silent for a different reason: they feel that they were duped.

America went to war in Iraq without the legitimation of international law, and is under more pressure than ever to justify its actions. It will either become apparent that the information provided by its intelligence services, information to which Bush referred, was everything but accurate and reliable, or the president will have to admit that his administration drew untenable conclusions because it had already resolved to go to war.

The genesis of the war was recently explained by someone who should be very familiar with it: Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense and the neo-conservatives' most prominent ideologue. It was he who raised the issue of Iraq shortly after the attacks on New York and Washington. "In my opinion, September 11th only revealed the beginning of what these bastards can do as soon as they gain access to so-called modern weapons, and this is something we can no longer live with."

From then on, Wolfowitz admits, the war against Iraq was no longer a question "of if, but when." In other words, the Bush administration made its key decision 18 months before the war began. Until now, this could only be conjectured, but now it has been officially confirmed.

To justify their decision to go to war, Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld alternately employed three arguments: the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, his support for terrorist organizations in the Middle East, and his tyranny over his own people. But the priority never really changed: America wanted to use Saddam's biological and chemical weapons as justification for regime change in Iraq.

"The truth is," says Wolfowitz in summarizing the decision-making process in Washington, "that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on." What he is referring to is the ongoing antagonism between those in the State Department who were skeptical about war and the warmongers at the Pentagon.

It was in fact common knowledge that Saddam had arsenals of biological and chemical weapons. But the American president acted as though much more were at stake, if not everything. The White House compared Saddam to Hitler and Stalin, the opponents of war in the UN Security Council to the politicians in favor of appeasement prior to World War II, and the opportunities to establish a new order in the Middle East to the post-1945 reconstruction of Europe.

With such moral pronouncements, President Bush was able to generate substantial support for the war in his own country. However, this alarmism required new evidence - and this is generally the job of the intelligence services.

The Pentagon and the White House became involved in the information provided by the CIA and other services in a virtually unprecedented manner. Vice-president Richard Cheney, who considered the detour through the UN to be a waste of time, paid a number of visits to the CIA's analysts in Langley. Rumsfeld established his own department at the Pentagon, which reviewed the CIA material again. There was considerable distrust of the work performed by agents and analysts. From then on, the White House and the Pentagon took charge of the definitive interpretation of intelligence information.

Excessive interpretations were given preference. Ambiguous sources, such as defectors, were believed because it was useful to believe them. The facts were adjusted to produce the desired result. The goal justified the means - manipulation to support the mission of providing America with security.