Iraq, anthrax, and the hawks.

• Position: Comment - War on terrorism, United States

It didn't take long for the hawks to seize on the anthrax scare as a justification for the United States to go bomb Iraq.

"By far the likeliest supplier is Saddam Hussein," The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial on Oct. 18.

James Woolsey, former CIA director, wrote almost the exact same thing in the Journal's adjacent guest column.

Richard Butler, the bellicose leader of U.N. inspections in Iraq during the late 1990s, took to the op-ed page of The New York Times the same day to insinuate that Iraq was behind the attacks: "If the scientific path leads to Iraq as the supporter of the anthrax used by the terrorist mailers, no one should be surprised."

Three things need to be noted about this "Let's Get Iraq" chant.

First, the hawks wanted to Overthrow Saddam Hussein even before any anthrax was delivered.

Second, the evidence against Iraq is not overwhelming.

Third, it makes no sense for Iraq to be behind the anthrax attacks.

To get a glimpse of the anti-Iraq crowd, look no further than The Weekly Standard of Oct. 1. The cover had a WANTED sign on it with two pictures underneath: one of Osama bin Laden, the other of Saddam Hussein.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is the chief advocate of this campaign within the Administration. Joining him on the outside are many has-beens of the foreign policy establishment.

Much of the case for the Iraq connection rests on two claims: first, Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague last year; and second, the anthrax sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was "weapons grade" or "weaponized" and could have come from only the United States, Russia, or Iraq.

Neither of those claims is persuasive.

There are any number of reasons why the Iraqi intelligence agent may have met with Atta. "Almost any intelligence agency has met with Al Qaeda. It's a player in the region," says Erik Gustafson, executive director of Education for Peace in Iraq, based in Washington, D.C. "The Iraqis have some intelligence interest in tracking what Al Qaeda is up to." Gustafson said he's seen some reports that Baghdad may have been pursuing alleged links between Al Qaeda and a militant Kurdish group in northern Iraq. It's also possible, he said, that the Iraqi agent was acting as a rogue, or that he was not fully aware of what Atta was planning on September 11.

And the anthrax evidence does not point directly to Baghdad. Many news stories have reported that a knowledgeable microbiologist with...