LAST WEEK had some good moments for the men and women struggling to put an optimistic spin on President Bush's war against Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq.

First, there was the media attention drawn to the happy homecoming of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, the West Virginia 20-year-old who became the Pentagon's poster child for grit and courage at a time when it looked as if the war in Iraq was not going well.

Lynch's injuries and capture by the Iraqis -- wildly exaggerated by the U.S. military -- and her rescue by U.S. special forces from an Iraqi hospital -- somewhat exaggerated by the Pentagon -- kept Americans glued to her story while the bad phase of the war was under way.

Lynch's return last week to her home in Palestine, W.Va., after almost four months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, provided another media distraction from the hard questions being asked about whether Bush lied to Americans to justify the war in which Lynch was nearly killed.

It must be said here that Lynch is not the problem. She apparently doesn't remember much, if anything, of what happened to her. The problem was the media hype about her story generated by the military and swallowed enthusiastically by the press.

Lynch has a quiet, almost bashful dignity about her. This was evident in the few words she spoke at her homecoming last week, which included:

"I'm happy that some of the soldiers I served with made it home alive. It hurts that some of my company didn't."

The other really terrific moment for the White House and the Pentagon occurred the next day.

Saddam Hussein's sons, Odai and Qusai, the ace of hearts and the ace of clubs in the U.S. occupation force's deck of most-wanted Iraqis, were trapped and killed in Mosul, Iraq.

This was a singular achievement, not so much of arms and intelligence, but of bribe money well-spent. The owner of the house in Mosul where the brothers were holed up is said to have alerted the Americans that Odai and Qusai were there. For that, he is expected to collect the $30 million reward -- $15 million for each brother.

The death of the two was hailed as a major breakthrough likely to diminish the intensity of attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. The assumption is that those attacking Americans were inspired by allegiance to Odai and Qusai, and their dad, Saddam.

Certainly, Odai and Qusai were two of the vilest, meanest creatures on the planet. Odai, in particular, was a sadist of practically unimaginable capacity. If anyone deserved a cruel death, it was they. And the same may be said of their evil father.

But let's not lose sight of why we were told this war was fought and what the result was supposed to be.

Americans were not sent to war to kill Odai and Qusai. They were not sent to war even to kill Saddam Hussein. Those would have to be considered collateral advantages attached to a larger imperative.

President Bush told Americans they were going to war because Iraq posed an immediate and imminent threat to the security of the United States and its citizens.

Those threats existed in two forms. One was weapons of mass destruction. The instruments of mass destruction, we were assured, were chemical, biological and nuclear. Indeed, the threat was so imminent that no more time would be wasted waiting for United Nations inspectors to confirm that these instruments existed, or that they did not.

The other was terrorism. In his process of persuasion, Bush linked the regime of Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks against the United States.

The United States now occupies all of Iraq. It can go wherever it pleases. But no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Not a shred of evidence has been found. Moreover, the president's assertion that Saddam Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons was a lie.

People are falling over themselves to take the blame for putting the lie in the president's mouth. But that does not alter the fact that he said it, and it became a part of the reason for going to war.

Which brings me back to Pvt. Jessica Lynch and what she had to say when she returned home:

"I'm happy that some of the soldiers I served with made it home alive. It hurts that some of my company didn't."

The day after Odai and Qusai were killed, the notion that it would make a difference in attacks against Americans was squashed by the deaths of three American soldiers in Qaiyara, Iraq.

On May 1, Bush, costumed in the uniform of a military aviator, stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared that major combat was over in Iraq. Since then, about four dozen Americans have been killed by the enemy. Hardly a day goes by that the Pentagon does not list the names of the latest dead.

When Bush made his "Top Gun" appearance aboard the Abraham Lincoln, critics complained that it was over the top, especially for a chap with such a poor attendance record in his safe experience years ago with the Texas Air National Guard.

Still, everybody expected that Bush's Top Gun bravado would show up in his re-election campaign ads.

But if Americans keep getting killed in Iraq and Bush can't prove there was a very good reason to send them there, he ought to make sure no one remembers that film.

It was an embarrassment then. Now it is an insult.

Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun

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