As the levels of violence continue to increase in the buildup to Jan. 30 elections in Iraq, the reason for going to war in Iraq has been shattered. If it was not already.

Forget the current reasoning – that the Iraqi people are better off now – the Bush administration spent a year and a half convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that had to be dealt with. His weapons programs had the potential to eliminate large numbers of innocents, and if the United States sat idly by then all of us would pay for it. Dick Cheney even used mushroom cloud metaphors in speeches during the run up to war in late 2002.

Except of course that no weapons exist, and they never did.

The dearth of weapons was not from lack of searching. The Iraq Survey Group had as many as 1,500 military and intelligence specialists searching the entire country. From former military installations to ordinary factories, two years of searching yielded nothing. The group ended its multi-million dollar expedition late last week.

It seems that W’s father, Bush 41, did a good job in Operation Desert Storm. According to the chief U.S. weapons inspector, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and had not made any since before the 1991 Gulf War.

Ed Board feels like it has been had – and you should too.

Bush press secretary Scott McClellan said, “Based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action because this is about protecting the American people.”

So the American people were threatened by a dictator with no WMDs in Iraq, but are completely safe from growing nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. You should remember them – they are the other two members of “The Axis of Evil.”

And if they do become a threat, the U.S. is in trouble because our international credibility has been destroyed.

The Bush administration needs to take seriously the results of a presidential commission that is in the final stages of investigating current U.S. intelligent capabilities and what went wrong with the Iraqi intelligence.

Their report, due out March 31, along with ongoing reforms within the intelligence agencies will hopefully prevent future administrations from making the same mistakes.