NEW YORK -- One duplicitous aspect of the United States' war on Iraq has been the use of the term "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). No, I am not talking about the kinds of weapons that are assumed in the question raised by the conservative Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak on April 7 -- "Where are the WMD?" -- although that certainly is an important issue.

Even though most people seem to agree that the real purpose of America's war was not Iraq's possession of WMD, the U.S. government touted it as such. In his column, Novak concluded that a consequence of failing to "come up with substantiation of the avowed reason . . . to remove Saddam Hussein from power . . . may be the ruptured international relations of the United States."

The WMD that I have in mind are something else. In his WorldNetDaily column on April 14, Pat Buchanan wrote: "(The war) was a triumph of technology and air power. Perhaps 1,000 cruise missiles and 20,000 precision-guided bombs smashed Iraqi command-and-control and army formations even before they could engage us." Buchanan, who is as conservative as Novak, was, like Novak, steadfastly opposed to the war while the Bush administration was engaged in a massive buildup for it.