Tommy Denton

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When the order of battle started taking shape to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration strategists were careful to emphasize that the vile dictator posed a clear and present danger because of his stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, including his imminent development of a nuclear arsenal.

Such a peril, the message went, was more than a peace-loving world could tolerate.

As events have played out, however, more than 70 percent of the American public has now withdrawn support for sustaining a war -- now in its fifth year -- that began on a premise of ridding a tyrant of nukes, a premise that subsequent evidence has shown was not true.

Even so, that awareness took some time and significant inspection to emerge. Yet, just to be sure, the Central Intelligence Agency continued to monitor Iraq and other dangerous regions of the world to detect smuggled nukes and attempt to curtail their proliferation.

In the course of the domestic political battles over the war, the unfortunate give and take led to the exposure by administration officials of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. The exposure was political payback because her husband had written a newspaper essay that refuted an administration contention that Saddam had tried to buy nuclear raw materials from Africa. He hadn't.

Senators from both parties and comedians alike had a field day with the spy-outing, but none of the cable commentators produced sharper criticism than Bill Maher.

"Valerie Plame was the CIA's operational officer in charge of counter-proliferation," Maher said in his program a week ago. "Which means she tracked loose nukes. So, when Bush said, as he once did, that his absolute, No. 1 priority was preventing terrorists from getting loose nukes, OK, that's what she worked on. That's what she devoted her life to. Staying undercover for 20 years. Maintaining two identities every [expletive deleted] day. This is extraordinary service to your country. Valerie Plame was the kind of real life secret agent George Bush dreams of being ..." and concluding with Maher's acerbic critique of the president's relative competence.

None of this, says the White House, suggests that the possession of nukes necessarily creates an inherent threat to the peace and stability of the planet. No, the administration's clear message is that we will determine which nations may pose acceptable threats by the proliferation and deployment of those weapons of mass destruction.

We, the people of the United States, remain a clear exception to the objectives of nuclear nonproliferation, as the Bush administration has demonstrated by indicating its plans to upgrade and enhance the U.S. arsenal.

Such weapons clearly should not find their way into the hands of people who can't be trusted with preserving peace, human rights, the democratic respect for constitutional order and so forth. So, we'll be the deciders as to who is trustworthy and who is not.

Unfortunately for that administration policy, most of the rest of the world grows restive, apprehensive and resentful at such swashbuckling unilateralism. Not only developing nations but also longtime allies wonder whether the United States itself can still lay claim as a reliable and trustworthy leader of the free world.

Until Bush's 2001 inauguration, and despite some difficulties in containing "loose nukes" from former Soviet republics, considerable progress had been made under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to isolate, contain and eventually dismantle such weapons. The United States was among the first to sign the treaty.

John F. Kennedy had sought more than 40 years ago to eliminate such doomsday instruments. A nationwide Associated Press survey in 2005 indicated that 66 percent of Americans still agreed, expressing the belief that no nation should possess nuclear weapons.

Locked in a Cold War mind-set, this administration still advocates the nuclear deterrent through the threat of mutual assured destruction. President Bush should reconsider that logic. Zealots who already have demonstrated their passionate dedication to suicidal martyrdom aren't easily deterred.

Should the terrorists acquire no more than a "dirty" bomb -- never mind a stockpile of megaton warheads -- the threat level to the United States would escalate far higher than at any time during the worst tensions of the Cold War.

So much for global leadership by good example.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.