David Kay, the expert tapped by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to serve as the chief nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, couldn’t have been more direct in his recent report: There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In an interview with Reuters News Service, Kay was asked: “What happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone suspected to be there [in Iraq]?”

He replied, “I don’t think they existed.”

What is clear from Kay as well as newly declassified CIA documents is that the basic rationale for last year’s preemptory strike against Iraq was flawed because there was nothing to preempt.

Rather than face up to having misled the U.S., the U.N. and the world, Bush and his top advisers are essentially playing a childish, though deadly, game of what has been described as I-hit-him-before-he-could-hit me.

“I repeat to you what I strongly believe: that inaction in Iraq would have emboldened Saddam Hussein,” Bush said last Sunday on “Meet the Press.” The president continued, “He could have developed, you know, a nuclear weapon over time. I’m not saying immediately, but over time. Which would then have put us in what position? We would have been in a position of blackmail.”

Bush knew exactly what he was doing when he ordered the unprovoked attack on Iraq. Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, said by shifting the nation’s attention from domestic issues to foreign affairs, Bush went “From Bozo to Churchill.”

Writing in his book, “The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations of a National Disorder,” Miller observed: “…before you knew it, the seeming bozo was our savior. Not only were his famous foibles magically erased, but Bush’s entire political pre-history also slipped right down the memory hole – the fraud and thuggery in Florida, the Supreme Court’s complicity, the appointment of John Ashcroft, the budget-busting tax cuts, the moves against Social Security, the screw-you foreign policy, the slash-and-burn environmental policy, the lame prescription drug plan, the Jeffords controversy, California’s power black-outs, Dick Cheney’s Enron black-out and the many other signs of Big Oil’s toxic spread, and on and on.”

Regrettably, the media served as willing co-conspirators.

CBS anchorman Dan Rather said to late night show host Dave Letterman on September 18, 2001: “George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions – and you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where. He makes the call.”

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman was equally effusive, saying Bush was “a model of unblinking, eyes-on-the-prize decisiveness.” Fineman described Bush as “commanding,” “astute” and “eloquent.”

George Bush, eloquent? Not in this lifetime.

While Bush was re-crafting his public image, aided by a cheerleading media, little attention was paid to why we really went to war.

Former Secretary of Treasury Paul O’Neill was criticized by the Bush administration for stating that Bush was determined to get Saddam Hussein at all costs.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein is a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said on the television program “60 Minutes.” He explained, “From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime.”

O’Neill wasn’t alone in making that assertion.

David Martin of CBS reported on September 2, 2002: “Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.”

Former Army Gen. Wesley Clark, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last June, said pretty much the same thing.

CLARK: There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.

TIM RUSSERT: By who? Who did that?

CLARK: Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, “You got to say this connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.” I said, “But – I’m willing to say it, but what’s your evidence?” And I never got any evidence.

Clark didn’t get any evidence because there was none.

Rather than holding Bush and his top officials accountable, the media is allowing them to say, in effect, that it doesn’t matter why we went to war as long as the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein.

Speaking in Charleston, S.C., Bush said, “Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq.”

That’s the real intelligence failure.