'If the intelligence had been right," ABC's Charles Gibson wondered, "would there have been an Iraq war?"

This is not a difficult query - unless of course it is directed at President George Bush.

"You know, that's an interesting question," Bush replied. "That is a do-over that I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate."

In the interview with Gibson, which aired Monday, the president seems to inch as close as he probably ever will to acknowledging that the war was inconceivable without the myth of weapons of mass destruction.

Millions of Americans supported an invasion mainly because of the possibility that Saddam Hussein might someday arm terrorists with WMD or use them against his neighbors. Without the trump card of WMD, most of us would have refused to rally behind a fullscale showdown with Saddam.

Sure, there were other reasons, and plenty of them, to yearn for the demise of Saddam. But weapons of mass destruction were paramount. This newspaper's editorial of March 20, 2003, was typical of many voices supporting the invasion. The bulk of our analysis recounted the many stymied efforts to disarm Saddam and make him comply with United Nations' demands. We emphasized that Iraq, in the words of former President Bill Clinton, was "a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed."

Clinton had been as wrong about Iraq's arsenal as Bush would turn out to be.

In the past (and especially during the 2004 campaign), Bush indicated that he would have made the same decision on Iraq even in the light of later knowledge. But if that remains the case, why did he also tell Gibson that "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein."

Surely that intelligence failure does not qualify as Bush's biggest regret just because "a lot of people put their reputations on the line." The intelligence failure only makes sense as the president's biggest regret if he would have taken a different course with different intelligence. Would he have?

The success of the U.S. military surge has emboldened some conservatives to act as if it discredits the anti-war left. In fact, the surge merely helps to even the political score. War critics were right to oppose the invasion but later wrong in claiming that new tactics couldn't make a difference.

Meanwhile, perhaps the most tantalizing question of all remains unsettled: Will a functioning (semi)democracy in Iraq survive long enough and govern wisely enough to provide an alluring example for the rest of the Muslim Middle East?

Will it, to quote the foreign policy goal cited in Bush's second Inaugural address, "advance the cause of freedom"?

If it eventually does - still a long shot, no doubt - history's verdict of Bush might be a great deal different from our own.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.