President Bush said

in his January State of the Union Address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium

in Africa—an extraordinarily important charge that could justify a preemptive

war (on the assumption that Iraq would only need uranium for nuclear weapons).

According to today’s Washington

Post, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice "said Secretary

of State Colin L. Powell did not include the uranium allegation in the speech

he gave to the United Nations on Feb. 5, eight days after the president spoke.

She said that was because [the State Department] had questioned the matter."

This suggests to me that top Administration officials realized before Feb. 5 that

the State of the Union speech had included a dubious, but extremely significant,

assertion. Why then did they not issue a statement casting at least partial doubt

on the uranium story? Failure to withdraw a false claim of such enormous magnitude

seems to me deeply unethical. It was not nearly enough to refrain from repeating

the charge.