Events do rush by us in a blur, I know, but let's not abandon Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 UN speech to the graveyard of history without one last backward glance. It was, after all, billed by the President as a conclusive intelligence briefing on exactly how Saddam Hussein has been concealing his weapons of mass destruction, and how he's hand in glove with Al Qaeda.

Now, when the Commander in Chief states publicly that his Secretary of State will deliver the goods, we can be safe in assuming he's been assured that, yes, the US intelligence "community" has indeed got the goods. But less than a week after Powell's speech it looked as though its major claims were at best speculative and at worst outright distortions, some of them derided in advance by UN chief inspector Hans Blix.

There was the supposed transporter of biotoxins that turned out to be a truck from the health department; the sinisterly enlarged test ramp for long-range missiles that was nothing of the sort; the suspect facility that had recently been cleared by the UN inspection teams; the strange eavesdropped conversations that could just as well have been Iraqi officers discussing how to hide stills for making bootleg whiskey. The promoter of the Iraq/Al Qaeda link, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, turns out to be an imaginative liar trying to get a prison sentence commuted; and the terror cell Ansar al-Islam, a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists violently opposed to Saddam and operating out of Kurdish territory.

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