President Bush is such an admirer of Winston Churchill that he keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office. You don't have to agree with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who likens Bush to Churchill, to see that the president has taken one of the British statesman's maxims to heart. "In wartime," Sir Winston confided, "truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

What is dawning on many people now is that in making the case for war, the administration and its allies did not make a fetish of strict honesty and candor. Why? Because if the American people had gotten the truth and nothing but the truth, they might not have been willing to go along with the whole enterprise.

But the strategy worked so beautifully that it's being used for the postwar occupation as well. We were given no idea of what would happen once victory was achieved, and we have been given no idea what lies ahead. The danger for Bush is that one of these days, the public may be hit in the face with a cold dash of reality.

The chief rationale for the invasion was that we had to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his vast arsenal of unconventional weapons. Unfortunately, those munitions have yet to be found, and Rumsfeld now admits that they may never be, because the Iraqis may have destroyed them.

Why a thug regime that defied the United Nations for years would be so fastidious about eliminating all evidence of guilt at its hour of doom is a deep mystery. But the administration would rather live with this puzzle than admit that maybe Saddam Hussein didn't have the arsenal that Bush told us about.